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Soft Targets and Crowded Places (ST-CP)
Mass Shooting Prevention and Research Depository
Mass Shootings—Which Aren’t and Which Are
As the number of shootings increases in the United States, the debate rages over what is and isn’t a mass shooting. Suffice it to say that the many definitions that exist for a mass shooting range from very conservative to very liberal and everything in between. The primary ones can be viewed here. Our unequivocal choice is the Mother Jones version, which we explain here.
The mass media loves to sensationalize a mass shooting. So much so they call most any trigger-happy lunatic a mass shooter and his carnage a mass shooting. But as the mass media is so often wrong, they’re in the wrong in this case as well.
Attempts to explain the mass shooting definition quandary focuses on what ingredients aren’t and are necessary to call a shooting a mass shooting. Because this subject is a complex one, we’ll explore the issue from that perspective.
Let’s start with what is not a mass shooting.
First, are it’s connections. If it’s domestic, drug/gang/organized crime*, or robbery related, it’s generally not a mass shooting. For instance:
—Domestic: An generic example of this is when a wayward Latino shoots and kills five members of his family inside their ramshackle house with Tyvek siding and then turns the gun on himself, or whatever. That isn’t a mass shooting. A man who kills his family is quite often not killing innocent people—children under a certain age excluded. For instance, a man who kills his wife and teenage children has killed people who have most often been players, to some degree, often for months or even years, that ultimately led to the killings. While there’s no doubt some domestic situations where those injured and/or killed were truly innocents, they’re the exception, and because it’s generally impossible to sufficiently ascertain the degree to which they were or were not innocent, it seems appropriate to exclude this category. An actual example of this occurred on April 19, 2023, in Bowdoin, Maine, when a shooter killed his parents and two of their friends. Three bodies were discovered in a home and one in a barn. The shooter later fired at vehicles on Interstate 295 in Yarmouth, Maine, injuring three family members. It was a tragic case that shocked the sleepy state of Maine but it wasn’t a mass shooting.
—Drug/Gang/Organized Crime: These connections are no-brainers for exclusion. If the purpose of tracking mass shootings is for research purposes, what purpose does trying to figure out why and how drug dealers, gangbangers, or mobsters slaughtered each other. You’d likely never figure out anything meaningful, but even if you could, why would we care? Generic examples of this include a cutthroat drug kingpin who decides to wipe out the competition that suddenly invaded his turf or when a errant Black gang member guns down some African American brothers in a drive-by shooting in a ghetto or when a “hit” takes place by organized crime. Neither of those are a mass shooting. An actual example of a drug/gang related shooting resulted in the deaths of six people including a 17-year-old woman and her 6-month old baby in Goshen, California. Another actual example is the famous Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 which involved the murder of seven associates and members of Chicago’s North Side Gang that occurred on Saint Valentine’s Day. It had to do with gaining control of organized crime in Chicago, Illinois, during Prohibition. Neither of those were a mass shooting.
—Robbery: This one is also easy to exclude. Robbery is a crime unto itself. It’s almost always motivated by direct or indirect monetary gain, and as such, offers little insight into the factors that result in a mass shooting. A recent actual example of this is the robbery at the Lock Stock & Barrel Shooting Range in Grantville, Georgia, where 3 people were killed and approximately 40 weapons were stolen. While it obviously does not qualify as a mass shooting, it nonetheless is worthy of being dissected for what, if any, lessons that can be learned from it in terms preventing future such incidents. But it wasn’t a mass shooting. It was a robbery.
It should be noted that the preceding connections should also be excluded because there’s already significant efforts being put forth (and have been for decades) about preventing domestic violence; drug trafficking, gang activity, and organized crime; and robberies.
Second, is the number of people killed. All of the current definitions of what constituents a mass shooting require at a minimum three dead people. Surprisingly, there’s no qualifying number of injured. It’s understandable when it comes to most injuries, which might be nothing more that bruises. However, a shooting where X number of victims have been listed in critical condition by an accredited hospital for a period of 24 hours, or whatever, or perhaps are admitted to an intensive care unit and remain there for at least 24 hours, or whatever, would seem to be criteria for a shooting being a mass shooting. The latter is likely the best one because funding sources, like insurance companies, never allow that level of care unless it’s absolutely necessary. Anyway, a shooting that results in the deaths of two people, even if there’s over a hundred injured, some critically, isn’t a mass shooting. However, if a day or two later one of the critically injured victims dies it becomes a mass shooting. Seems arbitrary, doesn’t it? However, we concur with the need for deaths to be involved, because it is indictive of the gravity of the incident. In other words, suppose a shooter who wasn’t totally invested in shooting people or perhaps one with bad aim fired into a crowd from afar and the result is a lot of injured people, but the bullets cause only minor flesh and shrapnel wounds and all the other injuries, which occurred as a result of people trying to flee the scene, are minor. Do we want that defined as a mass shooting? Probably not.
So that’s what isn’t considered a mass shooting which logically leads us to what is.
Basically, mass shootings are incidents where usually a lone shooter indiscriminately kills innocent people of which he has little or no connection to in what is often a virgin public or semi-public place.
—Lone Shooter: Almost without exception mass shootings involve a lone shooter. In contrast, drug, gang, and organized crime shootings often involve several shooters. The previously mentioned Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was carried out by four assassins. The lone mass shooting shooter, often besieged with mental health issues, generally has no beef with anyone in particular. Rather he (and very rarely she) often have issues with society and/or the system. There may be people that triggered them, but those individuals often aren’t bullseyes, and even when they are, they’re just one of many random targets.
—Indiscriminately: Mass shooting shooters generally shoot indiscriminately at people. In other words, the shooter doesn’t know the shootees and/or they’re not involved in something together, they have no shared history. While it can be argued that some school and workplace mass shootings don’t wholly meet that criteria, the victims were nonetheless innocent people in a semipublic place.
—Innocent People: People who get shot during a mass shooting are generally what are considered innocent, in other words, they were shot solely because of where they were when some trigger-happy lunatic decided to open fire. It might be people who are at a bar sipping their favorite alcoholic beverage, people just chilling at a music festival, people at work doing their rudimentary job, people at school hitting the books, people devouring value meals at a McDonald’s Restaurant, people who are just doing their weekly grocery shopping or shopping at a Walmart Supercenter for school supplies for their budding fifth-grader. Some would argue that a school shooter student and a workplace shooter employee who kill and injure fellow students and colleagues have some degree of connection or history with the shooter, so they’re not truly innocent, but generally they were nonetheless untargeted. So, a mass shooting must result in the deaths to innocent people. While one of more victims might have been initially targeted it seems that the vast majority must be in the innocent category. For instance, a disgruntled employee who goes to his workplace to kill his supervisor who he blames for his termination of employment but also kills and injures numerous other people who were arguably innocent.
—Public or Semipublic Place: Mass shootings, almost without exception, occur in public or semipublic places. As recently as May 9, 2021, a perpetrator killed six people at a birthday party inside a private residence in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The number killed (six) definitely qualifies as a mass shooting but the location (a private residence) definitely doesn’t qualify as a mass shooting. Second, a mass shooting must, very nearly without exception, occur in a public or semipublic place. Why? Because a bunch of people killed and injured in a private residence doesn’t generally involve innocent people. It’s rare, but it can sometimes get murky. Like if a shooter crashes a big party at a private residence to kill his wife’s lover (a domestic situation) and also kills and injures a lot of unrelated people. Weren’t all the unrelated people innocent?
Second, as already stated, a mass shooting must jive with the term “mass” which is defined as a large number, meaning one or two people killed doesn’t qualify. But does that make sense?
The numbers applied to the various mass shooting definitions seem arbitrary. “… [T]he numeric value of 4 or more shot or killed … .” or “… three or more victims killed,” or whatever have no particular relevance. So then, we must ask ourselves why these numbers have been adopted?
It would seem that the tracking of mass shootings is done for research purposes, namely so that we can attempt to understand them better in the hope that we can prevent them from happening in the future. If that’s true, is a mass shooting with just one or two victims not worthy of being researched in pursuit of why and how it came to be? Is the worst mass shooting in history, the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 1, 2017, more worthy of research than other mass shootings?
The leading sources of data for gun violence and mass shootings are as follows:
—US Mass Shootings, 1982–2021: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation
—Gun Violence Archive
—Mass Shooter Database
—AP/USA Today/Northeastern University Mass Shooting Database
—Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund (2019)
—Mass Shooting Tracker
—Mass Shootings in America Database
The preceding list is in the order they appear in Mass Shootings in the United States — Table 1. Variation in How Mass Shootings Are Defined and Counted. The differences are significant.
Some of the current organizational definitions for a mass shooting would have included the previously mentioned Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. But what does that incident have to do with the December 14, 2012, mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 26 people, including 20 first grade students and 6 staff members were killed, and 2 staff members were injured? It should be noted that the perpetrator shot his mother to death at their home prior to going to the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Regardless, the answer is nothing. Gang members, some of whom were led by the notorious Al Capone, protecting their turf for lucrative criminal enterprise has absolutely nothing to do with first graders in their elementary school classroom doing their reading, writing, and arithmetic (three Rs). Does it?
As previously stated there is no universal definition for what constitutes a mass shooting. The government agencies and organizations that track mass shootings use very divergent criteria. In fact, two organizations at opposite ends of the definition criteria—Gun Violence Archive and Mother Jones—reported 647 and 12 mass shootings respectively in 2022. Talk about not being on the same page.
This leads us to attempt to reconcile the data for a truer portrayal of how many mass shootings actually occur. But such an assessment is not possible due to the differing criteria used for defining a mass shooting.
As you probably noticed, we adopted the Mother Jones definition of a mass shooting. Not only do we wholeheartedly agree with their definition, we also didn’t want to add another definition to the list which is already far too long. In fact, there shouldn’t even be a list. Some federal agency, presumably the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), should have established a universal definition for mass shooting decades ago when mass shootings first became prevalent. But it hasn’t happened. Until it does a universal definition for mass shooting is left to a handful of organizations with very divergent opinions. Once a federal agency has established a national definition for what constitutes a mass shooting a federal board needs to be formed to deal with those rare instances when a shooting incident may or may not fit the established criteria, which some will inevitability be.
The following is an example of a possible universal definition for a mass shooting:
To enter or remain in a public or semipublic place, armed with one or more loaded firearms, with the sole intent to injure and kill innocent people, and in fact shoots and kills three or more innocent people in that public or semipublic place.
There’s plenty of mass shootings that fit that definition, and when we study those, which the Preventable Mass Shootings Database has done, we’ll often have meaningful information about what we can do to prevent them.
One last thought. Perhaps in order to clear up the mass shooting ambiguity we need change what we call them. In other words we’ve got a slew of mass shooting definitions but only one name—mass shooting—for all of them.
Applying the tags random and targeted might seem like an answer, because those words relate to the majority of the criteria that defines a mass shooting, meaning if they’re domestic; drug, gang, or organized crime; or robbery related.
Tags of this type would be like the following:
—Random/Random (R/R) — Venue and people selected randomly.
—Targeted/Targeted (T/T) — Venue and people targeted.
—Random/Targeted (R/T) — Venue selected randomly and people targeted.
—Targeted/Random (T/R) — Venue targeted and people selected randomly.
If the preceding tags were applied to all mass shootings those that are domestic; drug, gang, or organized crime; or robbery related would most often be Targeted/Targeted (T/T), meaning the venue and the people were targeted. However, simply applying those tags accomplishes little to nothing because an incident that meets the Mother Jones criteria for what constitutes a mass shooting can also be Targeted/Targeted (T/T). For instance a mass shooting where an employee targets his place of employment and the people who work there that he blames for his troubles.
All of this is just a simple starting point for trying to differentiate what makes each mass shooting different, because they are very divergent. Our efforts to provide some degree of semblance to the mass shooting definition quandary is simple—we must have a cohesive way to show that murderous gang-bangers feuding over turf have absolutely nothing to do with the slaughter of first-graders in their elementary school classroom by a deranged recluse. Nothing much can be learned from the former, while a lot can be learned from the latter.
So, the next time a mass shooting hits the airwaves, and it will very soon after you reading this, give it a litmus test and decide for yourself if it’s a mass shooting or not, in other words an incident worthy of being studied for what it can teach us.
Perhaps if we as a society could stop hemming and hawing about what constitutes a mass shooting, we might actually be able to focus on what really matters—how to stop them.
*Drug, gang, and organized crime connected shootings are combined into one category because incidents often involve two of them and occasionally all three of them.