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As has been widely reported there is not a 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—are reporting 123 and 1 mass shootings respectively so far in 2022.
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. In other words, if there were five reporters, all using the same definition for what constitutes a mass shooting, but their numbers differed, probably slightly, for whatever reason, a sum of all the tracked mass shootings divided by the number of reporters (five) would produce a number that would have some degree of meaning.
But, as indicated, that’s just not the case.
Our research finds that most attempts to explain the mass shooting definition quandary focuses on what ingredients are necessary to call a shooting a mass shooting.
Mostly, it’s the number of people injured and/or killed, and whether it’s domestic, drug, gang, mafia, and/or robbery related.
First, let’s consider the number injured or killed. It seems that any numbers applied here are arbitrarily used. “… [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?
Based on our research, the product of which is the Preventable Mass Shootings Database, some of the worse mass shootings in history are the ones which were the most preventable. Regardless, we believe all mass shootings, and many shootings, are worthy of being analyzed for what allowed them to happen and how.
A recent case in point 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.
Second are the so-called modifiers—their domestic, drug, gang, mafia, and/or robbery connections. These are must easier to explain.
First, domestic. 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 were most often players in a scenario, often months or even years in the making, 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.
Second, we’ll combine being gang, drug, or mafia related, and these 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?
Lastly, 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.
It should be noted that the preceding modifiers 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 robberies. The mass shootings we need and must analyze are generally those that occur in virgin public places by individuals solely hell-bent on killing innocent people.
So then, perhaps it’s time to succinctly define what a mass shooting is, not what it isn’t.
For instance, something like the following:
To enter or remain in a public place, armed with one or more loaded firearms, with the sole intent to kill innocent people, and in fact shoot and kill (?) or more innocent people in that public 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, mafia, or robbery related.
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.
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, mafia, 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.