My agenda is "words mean things" and if you're going to throw around a phrase like "mass shooting" you shouldn't have a low hanging fruit definition that does not take intent into consideration.
Here are two scenarios:
You have a party, two groups of people are talking. Words are had, there's an argument. Punches are thrown. One person pulls a gun, causing another person to pull a gun, multiple shots are fired and 5 people are injured.
You have a party, a disgruntled incel was not invited, shows up with a semiautomatic weapon and shoots 4 people before being dragged to the ground.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, both of these are "mass shootings" and if you go down their list of shootings of the year, the vast majority of them fall under category 1, not category 2.
The difference is, in scenario #1, nobody went to the party intending to shoot anyone. You can't say the same for scenario #2.
Lumping them together so you can make people think there are more cases of scenario #2 than there actually are is disingenuous.
My agenda is "words mean things"
If that was actually your agenda, this wouldn't be your position. You want to lower the statistic using semantics and as an added bonus, take away the vocabulary needed to discuss a huge percentage of gun violence.
The difference is, in scenario #1, nobody went to the party intending to shoot anyone. You can't say the same for scenario #2.
5 people were shot. Intentional vs accidental, premeditated vs impulse, none of that changes the fact that 5 people were shot and the event was a mass shooting.
Even in your own example that you made as contrived as you needed, 3 innocent people were still shot and swept under the rug.
The organizations you're rallying against are completely open about their definitions, making them far more honest than you're being.
I'm sorry if that hurts your guns feelings.
They aren't being honest because they do not discuss intent and they are intentionally trying to scare people by masking that.
I tell you what, starting 1/1 pay attention to what they're doing. By the end of January I expect you'll be stunned at the number of "mass shootings" that aren't what they're trying to scare people into thinking they are.
I should say too, the Gun Violence Archive isn't alone in this:
"This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government's Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.
In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn't confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn't meet the government's parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn't respond to our inquiries."
So, again, why do they want to keep everyone so afraid?
You know what would be a pretty interesting way to look at this would be?
Lets take every modern nation in the world (we can bicker about what "modern" means later), and lets create a database similar to the one you're taking issue with for each of those nations.
We can be just as uncharitable (or is it charitable?) in our definition of "mass shooting"... The exact issue you're having here right? You think that these statistics unfairly show the US in a negative light.
Well how about we take a look, by that same criteria, how many "mass shootings" these other nations have. Hell, we can even do it per-capita.
How do you think that would look?
I really don't care what other countries are or are not doing, the fact of the matter is other countries a) don't have a 2nd amendment and b) have universal health care, it's not an apples to apples comparison.
What I'm saying is, within the United States alone, there are organizations with a vested interest in making people afraid that they're going to get shot when the actual risk is extremely low.
The second amendment isn't some magic incantation, Jesus Christ.
Brain rotted.
No, it's the law of the land in the United States, you're free to not like that fact, but it doesn't change it.
The Constitution has always meant to be a living document.
It should evolve as reality changes for us, but people in this country are too brain-rotted and ammosexual to fix it. Wonder how that happened.....
Agreed, unfortunately the founders did not see fit to add an expiration date and made it essentially impossible to update it given our current divisions.
If you read the founders thoughts, there was an idea that all laws should expire every 19 years.
But what they wanted and what they enacted are two different things.
Want a new Constitution? Great, get 34 states to call for a Convention, write one, then get 38 states to ratify the new one. Good luck!
Currently, 28 of the required 34 states would call for a convention. Buuut they're all Red states. So the 2nd Amendment would likely be enshrined EVEN HARDER, along with taking the vote away from women and minorities, banning abortion, establishing a state religion, etc. etc.
Yeah, anyone who pushes for a Constitutional Convention these days hasn't done the math (or has ulterior motives). Anything we'd end up would be far worse than what we have.
Worse AND, since there's no real process for running a Convention, I could see a scenario where the old one is thrown out, but we can't seem to agree on a new one either, leaving the country adrift.
My agenda is "words mean things" and if you're going to throw around a phrase like "mass shooting" you shouldn't have a low hanging fruit definition that does not take intent into consideration.
Here are two scenarios:
You have a party, two groups of people are talking. Words are had, there's an argument. Punches are thrown. One person pulls a gun, causing another person to pull a gun, multiple shots are fired and 5 people are injured.
You have a party, a disgruntled incel was not invited, shows up with a semiautomatic weapon and shoots 4 people before being dragged to the ground.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, both of these are "mass shootings" and if you go down their list of shootings of the year, the vast majority of them fall under category 1, not category 2.
The difference is, in scenario #1, nobody went to the party intending to shoot anyone. You can't say the same for scenario #2.
Lumping them together so you can make people think there are more cases of scenario #2 than there actually are is disingenuous.
If that was actually your agenda, this wouldn't be your position. You want to lower the statistic using semantics and as an added bonus, take away the vocabulary needed to discuss a huge percentage of gun violence.
5 people were shot. Intentional vs accidental, premeditated vs impulse, none of that changes the fact that 5 people were shot and the event was a mass shooting.
Even in your own example that you made as contrived as you needed, 3 innocent people were still shot and swept under the rug.
The organizations you're rallying against are completely open about their definitions, making them far more honest than you're being.
I'm sorry if that hurts your guns feelings.
They aren't being honest because they do not discuss intent and they are intentionally trying to scare people by masking that.
I tell you what, starting 1/1 pay attention to what they're doing. By the end of January I expect you'll be stunned at the number of "mass shootings" that aren't what they're trying to scare people into thinking they are.
I should say too, the Gun Violence Archive isn't alone in this:
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent
"This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government's Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.
In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn't confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn't meet the government's parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn't respond to our inquiries."
So, again, why do they want to keep everyone so afraid?
You know what would be a pretty interesting way to look at this would be?
Lets take every modern nation in the world (we can bicker about what "modern" means later), and lets create a database similar to the one you're taking issue with for each of those nations.
We can be just as uncharitable (or is it charitable?) in our definition of "mass shooting"... The exact issue you're having here right? You think that these statistics unfairly show the US in a negative light.
Well how about we take a look, by that same criteria, how many "mass shootings" these other nations have. Hell, we can even do it per-capita.
How do you think that would look?
I really don't care what other countries are or are not doing, the fact of the matter is other countries a) don't have a 2nd amendment and b) have universal health care, it's not an apples to apples comparison.
What I'm saying is, within the United States alone, there are organizations with a vested interest in making people afraid that they're going to get shot when the actual risk is extremely low.
The second amendment isn't some magic incantation, Jesus Christ.
Brain rotted.
No, it's the law of the land in the United States, you're free to not like that fact, but it doesn't change it.
The Constitution has always meant to be a living document.
It should evolve as reality changes for us, but people in this country are too brain-rotted and ammosexual to fix it. Wonder how that happened.....
Agreed, unfortunately the founders did not see fit to add an expiration date and made it essentially impossible to update it given our current divisions.
If you read the founders thoughts, there was an idea that all laws should expire every 19 years.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/thomas-jefferson-on-whether-the-american-constitution-is-binding-on-those-who-were-not-born-at-the-time-it-was-signed-and-agreed-to-1789
But what they wanted and what they enacted are two different things.
Want a new Constitution? Great, get 34 states to call for a Convention, write one, then get 38 states to ratify the new one. Good luck!
Currently, 28 of the required 34 states would call for a convention. Buuut they're all Red states. So the 2nd Amendment would likely be enshrined EVEN HARDER, along with taking the vote away from women and minorities, banning abortion, establishing a state religion, etc. etc.
https://www.commoncause.org/our-work/constitution-courts-and-democracy-issues/article-v-convention/
Yeah, anyone who pushes for a Constitutional Convention these days hasn't done the math (or has ulterior motives). Anything we'd end up would be far worse than what we have.
Worse AND, since there's no real process for running a Convention, I could see a scenario where the old one is thrown out, but we can't seem to agree on a new one either, leaving the country adrift.