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If someone commits a mass killing with a gun, then it becomes a mass shooting.

Frankly speaking, it's not clear what this thread is about. According to social constructivism, social reality might change by re-defining terms like "mass shooting", but according to my sense of reality the number of victims doesn't change at all. I can also see no reason why Wikipedia shouldn't base their lists on the 'most official' terms rather than making up their own, as long as they make clear that this includes multiple homicides by gun, which they do.




> If someone commits a mass killing with a gun, then it becomes a mass shooting.

Yes. This sub-thread started with someone else arguing that one of the entries on the list of "mass shootings" did not deserve to be on the list.

If the argument is "it must involve deaths to be a mass shooting", that incident also involved zero deaths (and zero innocent civilian injuries).


Wait, I was wrong. The definitions clearly differentiate between number of people shot and number of people killed, and the Wikipedia article is explicit about the sources used and the definitions used by the sources.

There is nothing wrong with the list, but there seems to be some metalinguistic dispute about what's the best definition of "mass shooting."

This dispute is merely about words.


While most forum disputes are about words, I think that @frittig makes a valid point in questioning whether the lawful shooting of active criminal home invaders ought to be considered a "mass shooting" just because there happened to be a lot of home invaders. So, yes it's about words in part, but also about concepts.

For my part, all else being equal, for every N criminal home invaders, the optimal number of home invaders repelled by lawful force without injury to innocent civilians is also exactly N. If you want to mix those relatively rare good mass shootings in with other bad mass shootings (the vast majority of them), that's one way to approach things. You could also keep a list of "Things that happened on Tuesdays in history" and it would be a perfectly self-consistent list.


You are apparently looking at this from the perspective of the victims only, but the burglars were also armed and shooting. They have been arrested for it: "... charges including first-degree burglary, conspiracy, shooting with intent to kill and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony" [Oklahoma News 4, emphasis mine]

> good mass shootings in with other bad mass shootings

I'd certainly say that's better methodology than trying to define "good" and "bad" mass shootings and then only list the "bad" ones. (I don't quite see what's good about this shooting anyway, but I suppose you mean that the crime was stopped.)


That's exactly what I mean. No injuries to innocents; dangerous crime (armed home invasion) thwarted.




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