PA Bill Number: HB2235
Title: Providing for regulation of the meat packing and food processing industry by creating facility health and safety committees in the workplace; ...
Description: Providing for regulation of the meat packing and food processing industry by creating facility health and safety committees in the workplace; ... ...
Last Action: Referred to LABOR AND INDUSTRY
Last Action Date: Apr 25, 2024
Mother Jones: Left Claims '355 Mass Shootings' In 2015, Actual Number is 4 :: 12/05/2015
On December 3, Mother Jones editor Mark Follman addressed the left’s exaggerated claims of “355 mass shootings” this year and pointed out the actual number is about four.
Follman is addressing leftist media pundits, gun control groups, and actresses like Rose McGowan, who claim there have actually been 355 mass shootings in American in 2015 alone. On December 2 McGowan tweeted that the San Bernardino attack was the 355th this year. She wrote, “355 shootings this year. Well done you f**king idiots.”
But Follman shows that McGowan and others making that claim are off by about 351 shootings.
Writing The New York Times, Follman says:
At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have complied 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.
Note–The left claims 355 mass shootings this year along while Mother Jones’ research shows only 73 mass shootings since 1982. How can this be?
It is easy to understand when you consider the standard FBI measure for a mass shootings is four fatalities in one incident. And while Mother Jones is holding to this standard to judge what is or isn’t a mass shooting, the left is using outlets like Shooting Tracker, which says, “a mass shooting is when four or more people are shot in an event, or related series of events, likely without a cooling off period.”
A definition like the one used by shooting tracker opens the door to start counting gang violence, drive-by shootings, and other such incidents as “mass shootings.” Although there are no deaths–and there may be more than one shooting incident involved–every time four people are injured Shooting Tracker and the left counts one more mass shooting.
In reality, a shooting which no one is killed should simply be referred to as a shooting or an “attempted murder” or something similar, as it always has been. A shooting in which one is killed is a murder. If two are killed, it’s a double murder. If three are killed–as in the November 27 Planned Parenthood attack–it’s a triple murder. But when four or more are killed then–and only then–do the words “mass shooting” apply.
The four attacks Mother Jones reports as reaching the threshold for a mass shooting in 2015 are Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (9 killed), the military offices in Chattanooga (5 killed). Umpqua Community College (9 killed), and San Bernardino (14 killed).
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
New York Times Original Anti-Gun Story:
How Many Mass Shootings Are There, Really?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/opinion/how-many-mass-shootings-are-there-really.html?_r=1
On Wednesday, a Washington Post article announced that “The San Bernardino shooting is the second mass shooting today and the 355th this year.” Vox, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, this newspaper and others reported similar statistics. Grim details from the church in Charleston, a college classroom in Oregon and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado are still fresh, but you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015.
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.
For at least the past decade, the F.B.I. regarded a mass shooting as a single attack in which four or more victims were killed. (In 2013, a mandate from President Obama for further study of the problem lowered that threshold to three victims killed.) When we began compiling our database in 2012, we used that criteria of four or more killed in public attacks, but excluded mass murders that stemmed from robbery, gang violence or domestic abuse in private homes. Our goal with this relatively narrow set of parameters was to better understand the seemingly indiscriminate attacks that have increased in recent years, whether in movie theaters, elementary schools or office parks.
The statistics now being highlighted in the news come primarily from shootingtracker.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.
There is value in collecting those stories as a blunt measure of gun violence involving multiple victims. But as those numbers gain traction in the news media, they distort our understanding. According to our research at Mother Jones — subsequently corroborated by the F.B.I. — the more narrowly defined mass shootings have grown more frequent, and overwhelmingly involve legally obtained firearms. Experts in the emerging field of threat assessment believe that this is a unique phenomenon that must be understood on its own.
One thing we all need is better data. Since 1996, Congress and the gun lobby have prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting comprehensive research into gun violence. In the wake of the latest horror, and the confusion that followed, will that finally change?
Mark Follman is the national affairs editor at Mother Jones.
