The source of the much-publicized data is the \u201cMass Shooting Tracker\u201d at shootingtracker.com, a crowdsourced page that defines a \u201cmass shooting\u201d as any in which \u201cfour or more people are shot in one event, or related series of events, likely without a cooling off period.\u201d Victims might include the gunman; the data is based on news reports. There are obvious problems, one identified by the FBI in a 2014 report on active-shooter situations, which couches its own statistics by noting: A handful of those identified as \u201cwounded\u201d were not injured by gunfire but rather suffered injuries incidental to the event, such as being hit by flying objects\/shattered glass or falling while running.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now, when most people think “mass shooting”, they’re thinking of a “spree killing” – where a stranger randomly tries to kill a large number of random people he or she doesn’t know, for no purpose other than their own twisted desire for media immortality.<\/p>\n
And that number – naturally – is, while tragic, much lower; I’ll add emphasis:<\/p>\n
The Congressional Research Service\u00a0[defines]\u00a0\u201cMass murder\u201d is a multiple homicide with at least four victims, not including the offender; a \u201cmass shooting\u201d is a mass murder committed with a firearm; and a \u201cmass public shooting\u201d is a mass shooting \u201cin at least one or more public locations, such as a workplace, school, restaurant, house of worship, neighborhood, or other public setting\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0and not attributable to any other underlying criminal activity or commonplace circumstance<\/strong> (armed robbery, criminal competition, insurance fraud, argument, or romantic triangle).\u201d Using these definitions, Grant Duwe, in his 2007 book Mass Murder in the United States: A History, notes: \u201cExcluding those that occurred in connection with criminal activity such as robbery, drug dealing, and organized crime, there were 116 mass public shootings during the twentieth century\u201d (emphasis mine). The Congressional Research Service reported 317 mass shootings between 1999 and 2013, only 66 of which qualified under their criteria as mass public shootings<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nToo many? \u00a0Sure.<\/p>\n
But “Four per year” doesn’t sound as dramatic as “one per day”, does it?<\/p>\n
The American left’s motto used to be “never waste a crisis”. \u00a0Today, it seems to be “create the crisis you want”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That figure that the media and the anti-gun chanting-point-bots are jabbering about – where there’ve ostensibly been 355 “mass shootings” so far this year? Yeah, it’s BS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[325,340,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-gun-control","category-lie-first","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56520"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56522,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56520\/revisions\/56522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}