Criticism of Vox's Mass Shooting Tracker and our opportunity

[hso]

Vox's mass shooting tracker and their 353 number has been oft quoted by antis, but they are starting to get grief because USA Today and leftist Mother Jones contradict them. In response they give the completely disingenuous "but suicides are what's really important!"

They do provide us with great fodder to trash their credibility and strengthen our support for the 2A -

"What's happening here a dispute not about the facts, but over what the appropriate definition is." No, what's being distorted are the facts! A definition establishes the basis for a fact. If the fact is that POTUS says there have been 353 mass shootings this year instead of 4 based on Vox's twisted definition instead of more valid definitions then the facts are that there have been 4 mass shootings instead of 10 times as many. Vox defined a mass shooting to include gang and perpetrator numbers and homicides involving people who had issues with each other instead of what people fear, random unpredictable attacks.

"THE BEST CASE FOR GUN CONTROL HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH MASS SHOOTINGS, AND ISN'T NECESSARILY FOCUSED ON HOMICIDES AT ALL" Thank you very much! Responsible people have been saying mass shootings don't have much importance when looking at real threats, but that hasn't stopped Vox and their distortions from trying to scare the public into thinking that guns are going to be involved in a mass shooting every day of the week that they might walk into.

"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." Again, thank you for telling the truth for a change while still trying to terrify the public with your lies about mass shootings. The mass murderers that attacked random people they had no relationship with in SC, CA and CA are what the Antis are now trying to put the public in a panic over so they can push anti 2A legislation. Vox's lies about mass shootings are fodder for those lies to panic the public.

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 [email protected]

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 but excludes "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

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:

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 he writes 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

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 have higher 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.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

Both sides seem to ignore what the definition of "mass shooting" is. The concept of "mass shooting" is a hot button topic, no doubt, that both sides are attempting to manipulate to their favor and deviating from the operational definition.

The pro gun side seems to down play anything other than public, rampage styles of mass shooting, discounting any mass shooting that actually fits the FBI definition, but that they feel should not be tallied, such as gang, robbery, domestic, drive-by, and other sorts of mass shootings.

I have randomly gone through 40 of the shootings on the list. So far, all fit the criteria set forth by the FBI. I won't be surprised if some turn up that don't fit, but so far, it is 40 for 40. Most are local, non-national news-catching events.

Now, compare this with the news cast I saw last night with "experts" and talking heads categorizing the San Bernardino event (which is apparently terrorism) with other mass shootings as all being terrorism, such as Newtown, Tucson, Aurora, and mall shootings, which have nothing to do with domestic or international terrorism, but yet have been unduly and wrongly upgraded as such.

As near as I can tell, neither side is playing fair with what they do with the information available. Both are twisting basic information to suit their agenda. Fighting lies with lies makes for invalid arguments by both sides.

 

[MachIVshooter]

To me, the existing definitions don't work. I do not see the number of victims being relevant. It is the nature of the act that qualifies or disqualifies an incident as a "mass shooting"

two gangs battling it out and leaving many dead and wounded is gang warfare, not mass shooting.

The firearm murder/suicide of a 4+ member family is not a mass shooting.

A disgruntled employee who kills 4+ specific targets at work is not a mass shooting.

An incident where a person opens up on a crowd indiscriminately is a mass shooting IMO, even if he or she only manages to wound a handful of people with no fatalities.

I also don't agree that the number of perpetrators matters. Some definitions require a single actor; I reject the notion that the indiscriminate shooting of multiple random people is not a mass shooting just because there was more than one shooter. San Bernardino definitely qualifies as a mass shooting, as well as an act of terrorism.

It's the intent, not the number of casualties or actors, which should define "mass shooting".

 

[SKILCZ]

To me, the existing definitions don't work. I do not see the number of victims being relevant. It is the nature of the act that qualifies or disqualifies an incident as a "mass shooting"

two gangs battling it out and leaving many dead and wounded is gang warfare, not mass shooting.

The firearm murder/suicide of a 4+ member family is not a mass shooting.

A disgruntled employee who kills 4+ specific targets at work is not a mass shooting.

An incident where a person opens up on a crowd indiscriminately is a mass shooting IMO, even if he or she only manages to wound a handful of people with no fatalities.

I also don't agree that the number of perpetrators matters. Some definitions require a single actor; I reject the notion that the indiscriminate shooting of multiple random people is not a mass shooting just because there was more than one shooter. San Bernardino definitely qualifies as a mass shooting, as well as an act of terrorism.

It's the intent, not the number of casualties or actors, which should define "mass shooting".

I tend to agree, and the government has moved the goalposts, changing definitions for "mass shooting" more than once. They have decreased the number of victims necessary to meet the definition, so naturally, the apparent incidence has increased. In other words, if we decrease the criteria necessary to meet a definition, we will see an apparent increase in the incidence of that definition--even if the data don't change. If we lower the body mass index (BMI), for example, that qualifies someone as "obese," then we could argue that a higher percentage of people are obese than were previously--even if no once changes their weight at all from the previous year's statistics. Changing definitions matters.

When most people think "mass shooting," they think of something random and public, like Sandy Hook. They don't think of a crazy father killing his wife & kids and then himself or of one gang killing 3-4 members of a rival gang.

Regardless of what definitions we use, violent crime has been declining for ~40 years. We can pick and choose data subsets, manipulate definitions, and do other things to make the numbers seem like there's an "epidemic," as the gun control activists want, but it isn't true. Gun ownership has been increasing to an all time high while violent crime has been decreasing.

 

[hso]

This is why the Mother Jones definition, which matches our definition most closely, makes the Tracker appear to be such a lie.

Our use of this information is what is important in combating the deception of the Antis.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

This Mother Jones definition?
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/08/what-is-a-mass-shooting

We honed our criteria accordingly:

The attack must have occurred essentially in a single incident, in a public place;
We excluded crimes of armed robbery, gang violence, or domestic violence in a home, focusing on cases in which the motive appeared to be indiscriminate mass murder;
The killer, in accordance with the FBI criterion, had to have taken the lives of at least four people.

This is interesting, because the MJ definition is simply a definition of mass murderer, modified down from the FBI definition. By the MJ definition, it isn't a mass shooting unless it is first a mass muder (4 or more killed in one event, not including the shooter). So a person could shoot 50 people in a single event, kill only 3, and not be a mass shooter.

 

[hso]

The reason you limit the count to homicides is that the injury count is conflated with people who received any treatment regardless of the injury as opposed to actually being shot. A homicide is a clear and definitive number vs. injured during a shooting (fell, heart attack, broken glass counted as bullet fragment).

 

[Deltaboy1984]

Wow I can't believe that I am in agreement with Mother Jones on how to count this tragic events that are political foder for the left to attack the 2nd Amendment.

 

[MachIVshooter]

Wow I can't believe that I am in agreement with Mother Jones on how to count this tragic events that are political foder for the left to attack the 2nd Amendment.

Do remember that their intentions are not benign. Being truthful on matters that are easily researched boosts their credibility, allowing them to use hyperbole or tricky semantics with relative impunity on the more obscure or recondite claims.

It's chess, only much more convoluted.

 

[hso]

True, but because they are far left of just about everyone they can be used to poke holes in the statements about 353 mass shootings this year. Of course it helps when you read through those 353 "mass shootings" and see they include kids with bb guns and other nearly as absurd incidents.

 

[hso]

Another poke in the eye of the 355 number from Mother Jones -

At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.

What explains the vastly different count? The answer is that there is no official definition for “mass shooting.” Almost all of the gun crimes behind the much larger statistic are less lethal and bear little relevance to the type of public mass murder we have just witnessed again. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others. Or that a late-night shooting on a street in Savannah, Ga., yesterday that injured three and killed one is in the same category as the madness that just played out in Southern California.

While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem. Everyone is desperate to know why these attacks happen and how we might stop them — and we can’t know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.

Worse, the numbers Vox is taking credit for are actually coming from an Anti subreddit

The statistics now being highlighted in the news come primarily fromshootingtracker.com, a website built by members of a Reddit forum supporting gun control called GunsAreCool. That site aggregates news stories about shooting incidents — of any kind — in which four or more people are reported to have been either injured or killed.

It’s not clear why the Redditors use this much broader criteria. The founder of the “shooting tracker” project, who currently goes by the handle “Billy Speed,” told me it was his choice: “Three years ago I decided, all by myself, to change the United States’ definition of mass shooting.” It’s also not clear how many of those stories — many of them from local outlets, including scant detail — are accurate.

 

[USAF_Vet]

We honed our criteria accordingly:

The attack must have occurred essentially in a single incident, in a public place;
We excluded crimes of armed robbery, gang violence, or domestic violence in a home, focusing on cases in which the motive appeared to be indiscriminate mass murder;
The killer, in accordance with the FBI criterion, had to have taken the lives of at least four people.

This might be the definition of what they say they are using, but I can't believe this is the definition they are actually using. I simply do no believe that 355 mass shootings have occurred in 2015 under this definition. Not when other sources who also claim to use this definition put the number closer to four.

 

[bobmcd]

USAFvet: that's the point of this thread. GunsAreCool is claiming 355 using their absurdly loose definition. Mother Jones is reporting four or five (I forget which), based on the definition you quoted: four or more dead, in public, etc., which is much closer to the FBI definition.

I can see where your confusion is coming from, since confusion is exactly what GunsAreCool is shooting for. Pun intended.

 

[hso]

USAF_Vet,

You're confusing the strict homicides criteria that Mother Jones used to identify 4 mass shootings that resulted in the murder of strangers and the ridiculous crowd sourced reddit/Vox mass shooting tracker criteria where any shooting of any sort is tracked to come up with the unbelievable 355 number for 2015. Gotta keep this stuff straight, brother.

 

[JSH1]

There is a lot of confusion on this thread.

Mother Jones has the lowest mass shooting count at 4. By their definition the Planned Parenthood shooting isn't a mass shooting because only 3 of the 12 people shot died.

Shooting tracker.com has the highest count at 355 because they count any case where 4 people are shoot at the same time under any circumstance. (VOX uses the count from shooting tracker.com). A negligent discharge at a trap club that dusts 4 people would be a mass shooting under their definition.

There are other counts that are in between these two. People from each side quote the number that supports their position though neither is a good gauge of the problem (one overly broad, the other overly restrictive)

 

[USAF_Vet]

Ok, thanks for sorting that out.

In the immortal words of Philip K. Dick, "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them."


I think this situation applies.

 

[TimSr]

There are other counts that are in between these two. People from each side quote the number that supports their position though neither is a good gauge of the problem (one overly broad, the other overly restrictive)

While you may not be in agreement with the lower number, in my opinion, it is a lot closer to the reality of what most of us would see as an accurrate definition, and if there is some "exaggeration on both sides" I would not agree with equating the two positions or degrees of exaggeration. I think the point most of us see is that each type action requires a different response, which makes classification important, whereas to some, banning guns is the answer that will solve all of them, and they prefer to make no distinction.

 

[High Plains Drifter]

Stats are very subjective and groups that use them cherry pick, or skew those that will serve their argument.

The National Safety Council used to publish statistics on accidental death which included murder. I downloaded those stats annually for several years, 8 if memory serves me, but lost those files in a computer issue. When I tried to recoup those stats at the NSC they would let you anymore unless you are someone they approve of.

Basically ALL off the statistics you see use by anti-gun folks are fabricated, or at best embellished FBI stats. I do remember that the stats stayed the same year after year in relation to population size. If you look at other countries stats in this area "gun violence" you will notice some interesting correlations to population size and latitude.

Being that the US has allowed almost unfettered immigration for a couple of decades our demographics have changed. Not all immigrants assimilate and adopt American culture thus changing the mix as well skewing the numbers. Also the Left has been hard at work to destroy individual family values and the idea of live and let live.

Vox, pretty much makes up stuff, for lack of a better description, so a methodical approach with countering facts like Ronald Reagan used in many speeches can quiet a lot of anti-gun inclined people.

These two sites are examples of anti-gun nuts fabricating ideas with no basis. Brace yourself!


http://csgv.org/blog/2015/psychology-gun-ownership/

https://desertbeacon.wordpress.com/2015/08/28/armed-and-dangerous-or-unarmed-and-disingenuous/

I apologize if this is not in keeping with the spirit of this forum, it is what it is.

Thanks

 

[Double Naught Spy]

The reason you limit the count to homicides is that the injury count is conflated with people who received any treatment regardless of the injury as opposed to actually being shot. A homicide is a clear and definitive number vs. injured during a shooting (fell, heart attack, broken glass counted as bullet fragment).

Well then it is just mass murder. That MJ is creating a definition of mass shooting that requires more criteria be met than the FBI standard for mass murder is just plain silly.

However, homicide is not clear and definitive any more so than injury. Either you are shot or you are not shot and either you live or you die. There are people that die in these events from non-gsw injuries or conditions. They are fewer, but it happens. So no, it isn't is not clear.

By making the criteria for mass shooting have to meet several other criteria BEYOND the FBI definition of mass murder, it certainly looking like the folks at MJ and others invoking this definition are trying to downplay the fact that shootings of 4 or more individuals other than the shooter do actually occur in high numbers.