Reason 1: The policies required to prevent mass shootings (as most people understand the term) are going to be different from the policies required to prevent violence of other sorts, like domestic violence, or violence perpetrated in the furtherance of other crimes. These are different kinds of social problems which require different kinds of solutions. Conflating them will not help develop policy to combat them.
Reason 2: People generally understand the term “mass shooting” to mean a rampage shooting where someone targets strangers, typically in public spaces, for reasons that either have no clear motivation (the so-called mental health shootings), or have abstract ideological motivations (e.g . racist terrorism). The definition being used to make the claim in the headline “Second worst year on record for mass shootings” runs the risk of leading people to believe that this year was the second worst year on record for rampage shootings, when that might not be true. You don’t even have to leave this comment chain to see people making the assumption that this about school shootings, but it is not, the overwhelming majority of the cases that support the headline are not rampage shootings, but I’d wager most people would assume that is what the story will be about. Do you really think that fact was lost on the people who wrote that article? Do the people who develop these databases not understand that most people think “mass shooting” is the same as “rampage shooting” as I have described it? It is difficult to believe that the equivocation is an accident, and that has the effect of making people who promote these kinds of stories appear disingenuous.
For all the problems of violence I have raised here, gun control probably has a role to play, but gun control policies are unlikely to be exhaustive of the possible solutions and gun control solutions in one context are not guaranteed to be effective in other contexts. conflating these obviously different types of violence–rampage killings are different from organized crime, which is different from domestic violence–makes policy advocacy more difficult. When advocates of gun control conflate these kinds of violence in ways any reasonable person would immediately recognize as misleading it makes them seem like they are liars, and so untrustworthy. If you live in the US, then you live in a place where gun control is a controversial idea, if your argument for more gun control involves equivocation, or otherwise relies on misleading statements, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
You argue there’s risk in conflating one type of mass shooting with another (domestic violence or criminal pursuit vs. ‘rampaging’) because it changes how policy would be considered, while simultaneously conflating two very different types of mass shooting (psychological instability vs. ideological terrorism) as one and the same. The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.
From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.
If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong. It’s not tenable as far as I can see. You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.
It can see two reasons why it matters.
Reason 1: The policies required to prevent mass shootings (as most people understand the term) are going to be different from the policies required to prevent violence of other sorts, like domestic violence, or violence perpetrated in the furtherance of other crimes. These are different kinds of social problems which require different kinds of solutions. Conflating them will not help develop policy to combat them.
Reason 2: People generally understand the term “mass shooting” to mean a rampage shooting where someone targets strangers, typically in public spaces, for reasons that either have no clear motivation (the so-called mental health shootings), or have abstract ideological motivations (e.g . racist terrorism). The definition being used to make the claim in the headline “Second worst year on record for mass shootings” runs the risk of leading people to believe that this year was the second worst year on record for rampage shootings, when that might not be true. You don’t even have to leave this comment chain to see people making the assumption that this about school shootings, but it is not, the overwhelming majority of the cases that support the headline are not rampage shootings, but I’d wager most people would assume that is what the story will be about. Do you really think that fact was lost on the people who wrote that article? Do the people who develop these databases not understand that most people think “mass shooting” is the same as “rampage shooting” as I have described it? It is difficult to believe that the equivocation is an accident, and that has the effect of making people who promote these kinds of stories appear disingenuous.
For all the problems of violence I have raised here, gun control probably has a role to play, but gun control policies are unlikely to be exhaustive of the possible solutions and gun control solutions in one context are not guaranteed to be effective in other contexts. conflating these obviously different types of violence–rampage killings are different from organized crime, which is different from domestic violence–makes policy advocacy more difficult. When advocates of gun control conflate these kinds of violence in ways any reasonable person would immediately recognize as misleading it makes them seem like they are liars, and so untrustworthy. If you live in the US, then you live in a place where gun control is a controversial idea, if your argument for more gun control involves equivocation, or otherwise relies on misleading statements, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
You argue there’s risk in conflating one type of mass shooting with another (domestic violence or criminal pursuit vs. ‘rampaging’) because it changes how policy would be considered, while simultaneously conflating two very different types of mass shooting (psychological instability vs. ideological terrorism) as one and the same. The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.
From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.
If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong. It’s not tenable as far as I can see. You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.