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Looks like another brutal year. 119 mass shootings in 92 days.
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Question: I did not hear much about mass shootings during most of the Covid year. Did mass shootings stop for a while (maybe due to the lockdown, maybe due to the Covid and lockdowns distracting men who would otherwise go on shooting sprees)? It seems to me that the news would have covered any major killing, so what happened?
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Ca Bob wrote:
Question: I did not hear much about mass shootings during most of the Covid year. Did mass shootings stop for a while (maybe due to the lockdown, maybe due to the Covid and lockdowns distracting men who would otherwise go on shooting sprees)? It seems to me that the news would have covered any major killing, so what happened?
No, in fact 2020 had more mass shootings than occurred in 2019. I think it just got to the point that there were other stories such as COVID, the election, and so on. Just the worst events made it into the news on the front page and widely across the US.
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GunViolenceArchive.org has 23 full pages of shootings (25 per page), plus 11 more. That makes it 586 for 2020.
School shootings were way down. EdWeek.org says there were 10, down from 25 in 2019.
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Basically mass shootings are becoming "normalized" and often don't get wide coverage. Just the worst events are making it into the public consciousness through media reports and social media. There is a main article on Wikipedia that lists the the major ones, lists half a dozen most commonly used definitions for a mass shooting, and has links to lists for each year over the past couple decades and by decade for the in the past-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ma...ted_States.
P.S. This shooting event has already made it onto the comprehensive list for 2021.
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Unless there are a minimum of four dead, it shouldn’t be included.
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Speedy wrote:
Unless there are a minimum of four dead, it shouldn’t be included.
You are welcome to get Congress to so define it, but until then there is no single definition recognized by statute or other policies for mass shootings. For "mass murder" there is a definition on the books for crime statistics gathered by the FBI which does use 4 killings in a single event as the definition.
I find your definition too narrow when there are events where less than 4 died, but a dozen or more were left injured, often seriously. If the ER and trauma personnel did't have so much practice treating gun shot wounds these days, many of these injured would have died and put the count over that threshold.