Posted on 12/05/2015 4:47:12 PM PST by Kaslin
Shortly after news broke of a shooting in San Bernardino (which we now know was a terrorist attack), Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit were abuzz that the events of December 2, 2015 were the "355th mass shooting" of 2015. Obviously, this was a concerning statistic--if it were actually true.
It turns out it wasn't, and even figures on the left agree. There's been nowhere near 355 mass shootings in 2015, and according to Mother Jones editor Mark Folman, there have been exactly four.
At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four "mass shootings" this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.
What explains the vastly different count? The answer is that there is no official definition for "mass shooting." Almost all of the gun crimes behind the much larger statistic are less lethal and bear little relevance to the type of public mass murder we have just witnessed again. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others. Or that a late-night shooting on a street in Savannah, Ga., yesterday that injured three and killed one is in the same category as the madness that just played out in Southern California.
While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem. Everyone is desperate to know why these attacks happen and how we might stop them — and we can’t know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.
As it turns out, the "355" number comes from an anti-gun subreddit and includes a far broader definition of "mass shooting" than the one used by either the FBI or groups like Mother Jones.
The statistics now being highlighted in the news come primarily fromshootingtracker.com, a website built by members of a Reddit forum supporting gun control called GunsAreCool. That site aggregates news stories about shooting incidents — of any kind — in which four or more people are reported to have been either injured or killed.
It's not clear why the Redditors use this much broader criteria. The founder of the "shooting tracker" project, who currently goes by the handle "Billy Speed," told me it was his choice: "Three years ago I decided, all by myself, to change the United States' definition of mass shooting." It's also not clear how many of those stories — many of them from local outlets, including scant detail — are accurate.
Events like the attack in San Bernardino on Wednesday or the shooting at Umpqua Community College in October are thankfully very rare. It's important to remember this and it's also important to ensure that statistics are accurate.
Most of those 335 statistic people were probably doing “recreational drugs” at the time or possibly fondling their genitals in their “safe space”.
Even using that criteria matching each of them to one of the major urban progressive controlled ghettos would account for 90% of them!!!!!!!!!
How many drunk driving accidents have there been this year?
The stink is too great for even hardened leftists.
Reading the original source article, I thought I almost detected something there called ‘intellectual honesty’.
Its too bad that they waited so long to trot out the reality, that all but FOUR of those 355 are utter bullcrap. Unfortunately, an awful lot of idiots believed it.
Many years ago the same ilk started using the term “assault weapon” to describe scary looking semi-automatic rifles. It stuck.
Now they are trying to confuse a well defined “mass murder” term with “mass shooting,” which is not well defined.
Mass Murder is defined by the FBI as: Mass murder (sometimes interchangeable with “mass destruction”) is the act of murdering many people, typically simultaneously or over a relatively short period of time. The FBI defines mass murder as murdering four or more persons during an event with no “cooling-off period” between the murders. The four murdered excludes the murderer.
Google “mass shooting definition.”
If there were 355 mass shootings, the lib media would be leading with them every day.
Well, 355 sound a lot better than 4 for gun-control advocates, doesn’t it. Nobody ever accused the left of honesty.
These stats (the 355 #) were used extensively in Yahoo “news” articles after San Berdoo ...
I went and looked at the site, and their criteria. An incident where three robbers went in, shot a store worker, and were then all shot by a good guy, would be put on the list as a "mass shooting". An incident where cops got into a shootout with a criminal, and some bystanders were hit, would qualify as a "mass shooting".
Essentially, ANY incident where four or more people were injured or killed by gunfire, was counted as a mass shooting.
One reason they are backing off this number so quickly is because someone produced a chart showing who these siupposed attacks have skyrocketed under Obama compared to other presidents. Once it makes O look bad, back off!
Meanwhile, planned parenthood has killed almost 400,000 people, chopped them up, and sold them for parts
While all are crimes some are terror related and some are simply crimes. A few gang bangers shooting one another in a park is not the same as San Bernadino.
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