Have there been 353 mass shootings this year — or just 4?

[Janelle2002 3,865]

Have there been 353 mass shootings this year — or just 4?

Updated by Dylan Matthews on December 4, 2015, 1:00 p.m. ET @dylanmatt dylan@vox.com

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George Frey/Getty Images

The shooting in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday was the 353rd mass shooting of 2015, according to the crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker that Vox uses for our maps documenting mass shootings. Or it was the 29th, if you use data from USA Today. Or it was the fourth, if you use a database maintained by Mother Jones.

How are three news outlets coming up with such different answers? It all comes down to definitions:

• The Mass Shooting Tracker defines a mass shooting as an event in which four or more people were shot.
• USA Today tracks mass killings, in which four or more people were killed.
• Mother Jones tracks mass killings in which four or more people were killed butexcludes "gang activity, armed robbery, or domestic violence."

There are other differences too — for example, Mother Jones says it generally only includes single gunman incidents, though it includes San Bernardino and the Columbine massacre in its database. But those are the main ones.

What's happening here a dispute not about the facts, but over what the appropriate definition is.

Why people care which definition is used

The Mass Shooting Tracker definition is fairly new, but the dispute between Mother Jones and USA Today is older and more ideologically fraught. That's because the Mother Jones definition suggests that mass shootings are rising in number, and the USA Today definition doesn't.

If you look at all killings in which four or more people died, there doesn't appear to be a strong upward trend, according to estimates by Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox, who uses a similar definition to USA Today:

(James Alan Fox/Science of Us)

But other researchers, like Amy P. Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller of the Harvard School of Public Health, argue that Mother Jones's more restrictive definition is appropriate. Cohen et al. analyzed Mother Jones's data and concluded that mass shootings were becoming more frequent. They measure the average period of time between mass shooting incidents, rather than the number of incidents themselves; mass shootings of the kind they're studying are rare enough to make the latter untenable. They find that the period of time separating mass shootings (by their definition) has been shrinking:

(Amy P. Cohen, Deborah Azrael, Matthew Miller/Mother Jones)

Which is the right definition to use?

So who's right? Well, Fox is right about the phenomenon he's studying, Cohen et al. are right about the phenomenon they're studying, and the Mass Shooting Tracker is right for the phenomenon it's studying. Declaring one or the other definition the "right" one is too pat; each is right for the thing it tracks. Fox's data tells us that shootings of four or more people didn't decline in the 1990s the way shootings as a whole did; that's concerning. Cohen et al.'s data tells us that high-profile public mass shootings like Aurora or Newtown have not only failed to decline the way normal shootings have but have increased in recent years; that's also concerning. And the Mass Shooting tracker tells us that mass shootings, deadly or not, are a daily occurrence in the US; that is, obviously, concerning.

But people still care about determining the "right" definition in cases like this for the purpose of ideological proxy warfare. Declaring Fox or Cohen et al. right, in particular, has a certain political valence in the wider gun control debate. You see something similar in discussions around school shootings, wherein gun control skeptics are as eager to declare that gang-related shootings in school are not real school shootings as they are to embrace Fox's definition in which gang-related mass shootings are real mass shootings — and vice versa for gun control supporters.

THE BEST CASE FOR GUN CONTROL HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH MASS SHOOTINGS, AND ISN'T NECESSARILY FOCUSED ON HOMICIDES AT ALL

What's frustrating about this is that whether mass shootings are increasing or decreasing in frequency has very little to do with the generalized case for gun control. Mother Jones's Mark Follman — who has done extraordinary work on gun violence in America, including compiling the data set used by Cohen et al. — is not wrong when hewrites that the Mother Jones–defined mass shootings are "a unique phenomenon that must be understood on its own." And it's worth studying both the phenomena identified by Fox and those identified by Mother Jones to find specialized ways to prevent them.

But mass shootings are very rare. By Fox's definition, there are between 50 and 125 victims a year (compared with 11,068 total gun homicides in 2011); by the Mother Jones definition, there are substantially fewer than that.

The real case for gun control

(CDC / WISQARS)

Mass shootings can and should be prevented, and their comparative rarity makes them no less monstrous or tragic. But the best case for gun control has little to do with mass shootings, and isn't necessarily focused on homicides at all. Of the 33,636 firearm deaths in 2013, 63 percent, or 21,175, were suicides. The evidence that the presence of additional guns contributes to more firearm homicides is persuasive, but research from the Means Matter Project at the Harvard School of Public Health (much of it done by Azrael and Miller themselves, along with Cathy Barber) shows that the evidence that guns contribute to higher levels of suicide is considerably stronger.

Suicide, contrary to popular belief, isn't typically planned and thought through extensively in advance. It's impulsive; one survey found that 90 percent of respondents deliberated for less than a day before attempting suicide. And 90 percent of people who survive suicide attempts end up dying by other means. They didn't make a considered choice and then seek to follow through by whatever means; they made an impulsive decision and got lucky. Ken Baldwin, who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, once told the New Yorker's Tad Friend that as he was falling, he "instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped."

AMERICA'S GUN HOMICIDE PROBLEM IS REAL, FRIGHTENING, AND MUST BE ADDRESSED. BUT ITS GUN SUICIDE PROBLEM IS CONSIDERABLY WORSE.

Guns make it likelier that these impulsive decisions end in death rather than in survival and recovery. Studies suggest that suicide attempts using guns are fatal in the vast majority of cases, while attempts using cuts or poisoning are only fatal 6 or 7 percent of the time. So it's perhaps unsurprising that areas with more guns tend to havehigher suicide rates, or that a number of gun control measures have been successful in preventing suicides. In one particularly dramatic case, the Israeli Defense Forces stopped letting soldiers bring their guns home over the weekend, and suicides fell 40 percent, primarily due to a drop in firearm suicides committed on weekends.

The dominant focus of gun control efforts, then, should be on keeping guns (and particularly handguns) out of the hands of suicidal people. America's gun homicide problem is real, frightening, and must be addressed. But its gun suicide problem is considerably worse. My concern is that disputes over whether this or that incident counts as a mass shooting reaffirms the myth that Jared Loughner and Adam Lanza are the face of America's gun violence problem. They're not. The tens of thousands who die every year because of depression and a nearby gun are. They are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the gun debate, and they deserve better.

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/4/9849390/mass-shootings-count

[Operator 1,927]

It seems obvious that there is a difference between mass shootings and mass killings.

[Dakine10 5,452]

The FBI only tracks mass murders, not mass shootings. Several different groups have come up with several different numbers for mass shootings.

I would be wary of data from any group that has an agenda. It's how we get 14% for the low range and 92% for the high range when they talk about mass shootings in gun free zones.

[The Nature Boy 7,659]

The FBI only tracks mass murders, not mass shootings. Several different groups have come up with several different numbers for mass shootings.

I would be wary of data from any group that has an agenda. It's how we get 14% for the low range and 92% for the high range when they talk about mass shootings in gun free zones.

Be wary of any group that has an agenda

There you go folks be wary of all groups

[Dakine10 5,452]

Be wary of any group that has an agenda

There you go folks be wary of all groups

Some groups do this objectively. I suppose I should have said be wary groups that have an ulterior agenda in collecting and releasing this kind of data. You know what they say about statistics.

[Janelle2002 3,865]

No one wants to talk about gun deaths when it comes to the suicide rates by gun in this country.

[lostinblue 1,989]

No one wants to talk about gun deaths when it comes to the suicide rates by gun in this country.

Because they will use something else.

[Merle 458]

No one wants to talk about gun deaths when it comes to the suicide rates by gun in this country.

What difference does it make when it comes to suicide? Is being dead by gunshot different than being dead by any other means? What about the high suicide rates in places like China and South Korea where guns are almost nonexistent in civilian hands?

[Janelle2002 3,865]

What difference does it make when it comes to suicide? Is being dead by gunshot different than being dead by any other means? What about the high suicide rates in places like China and South Korea where guns are almost nonexistent in civilian hands?

So why are we talking about China and S. Korea?

Let's talk about Australia, which just so happened to make a law, execute it, and has successfully lowered their gun death rates and used a gun buy back plan. It hasn't taken them 5 trillion mass shootings to "think" about changing America's gun laws.

[Sousuke 1,214]

So why are we talking about China and S. Korea?

Let's talk about Australia, which just so happened to make a law, execute it, and has successfully lowered their gun death rates and used a gun buy back plan. It hasn't taken them 5 trillion mass shootings to "think" about changing America's gun laws.

Latest data for suicide in Australia is 11/100,000

Latest data for suicide in the US is 12.6/100,000

I'm not seeing a major variation between the countries.

[Janelle2002 3,865]

[Janelle2002 3,865]

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/we-are-not-like-america-australia-has-had-no-mass-killings-since-gun-control-laws-tightened-20-years-ago

‘We are not like America’: Australia has had no mass killings since gun control laws tightened 20 years ago

"President Barack Obama has cited the country’s gun laws as a model for the United States, calling Australia a nation “like ours.” On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has said the Australian approach is “worth considering.” The National Rifle Association, meanwhile, has dismissed the policies, contending that they “robbed Australians of their right to self-defence and empowered criminals” without reducing violent crime.

The oft-cited statistic in Australia is a simple one: There have been no mass killings – defined by experts there as a gunman killing five or more people besides himself – since the nation significantly tightened its gun control laws almost 20 years ago.

Mass shootings in Australia were rare anyway. But after a gunman massacred 35 people in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur in 1996, a public outcry spurred a national consensus to severely restrict firearms. The tightened laws, which were standardized across Australia, are more stringent than those of any state in the United States, including California."

[Sousuke 1,214]

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/we-are-not-like-america-australia-has-had-no-mass-killings-since-gun-control-laws-tightened-20-years-ago

‘We are not like America’: Australia has had no mass killings since gun control laws tightened 20 years ago

"President Barack Obama has cited the country’s gun laws as a model for the United States, calling Australia a nation “like ours.” On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has said the Australian approach is “worth considering.” The National Rifle Association, meanwhile, has dismissed the policies, contending that they “robbed Australians of their right to self-defence and empowered criminals” without reducing violent crime.

The oft-cited statistic in Australia is a simple one: There have been no mass killings – defined by experts there as a gunman killing five or more people besides himself – since the nation significantly tightened its gun control laws almost 20 years ago.

Mass shootings in Australia were rare anyway. But after a gunman massacred 35 people in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur in 1996, a public outcry spurred a national consensus to severely restrict firearms. The tightened laws, which were standardized across Australia, are more stringent than those of any state in the United States, including California."

If you use the definitions in your first post, then Australia has indeed had mass shooting since Port Arthur.

[Janelle2002 3,865]

If you use the definitions in your first post, then Australia has indeed had mass shooting since Port Arthur.

How many? The data still points out they are doing better than us.

[Sousuke 1,214]

How many? The data still points out they are doing better than us.

Give a me a sec to see if I can find and tally them all up. Keep in mind that if they have even 7% the number of the US they win due to population differences.