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The policy strategy to prevent these two types of violence, I hope you’d agree, would be quite different.
They are similar from the perspective of violence, which is to say they generally feature violence in public areas by a small number of agents often armed with automatic rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge. Rampage shooters also target people in a way that is broadly indiscriminate, targeting a class of person rather than specific individuals. The two other forms of violence are more often personal or instrumental. Rampage shootings are rarely done for reasons of material gain. They often lack even an interpersonal conflict as a motivation. Which is to say that rampage shootings are not purely the result of someone wishing to harm a specific person with which they have a preexisting conflict.
These distinctions will not be dispositive of every single act of violence involving a firearm, people often have complex motivations for their actions, but they are certainly clearer than the definition of mass shootings used to justify the headline. Whats more, is they make the development of coherent policy easier. For example, laws that restrict people with domestic abuse records from firearm ownership are unlikely to have an impact on rampage shootings, but there is a chance they could impact domestic violence. Laws restricting magazine capacity for rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge are unlikely to impact domestic violence, but there is a chance they could impact rampage shootings. If you want policy to combat these different types of violence, you have to understand the different ways these violent acts are caused and carried out. The two problems are clearly different so why conflate them?
What if an advocate for gun control got a law passed that actually did reduce the number of rampage shootings? Would they want to use this definition to defend the effectiveness of their law? By this definition, we could eliminate rampage shootings entirely and still have a serious problem with mass shootings. Should we then conclude that a gun control law that eliminated rampage shootings was ineffective? If the purpose of the law was to reduce mass shootings, by this definition it was ineffective. It would barely make a dent! How much do you want to bet that anyone who found themselves having to defend a law that ended rampage shootings would quickly discover the problems with conflating rampage shootings with other forms of firearm violence? What’s more is that you have a definition that is obviously misleading in an environment that requires you to win the trust and support of the public. I don’t believe for a second that the people who wrote that headline thought that the average reader would understand that “mass shooting” would include cases of domestic or gang violence. Most people do not think of those things as being the same as “mass shootings” and plenty of people–as this very thread demonstrates-- react to the esoteric definition being used to tout the “second worst year on record” by concluding that the people making the claim are dishonest. That is a problem if you want to persuade people.
From my point of view, this is the inherent problem with the viewpoint you are trying to defend. You’re trying to bucket some shootings as acceptable and some as bad, and that’s a point, but that’s not the point.
This is an extremely uncharitable reading of what I have written. My point was that the definition of mass shootings fails to make distinctions between different types of violence. Those distinctions are critical to designing, and more importantly defending, policy. Further, my point was that the definition of mass shooting under consideration is misleading, because most people who hear the term “mass shooting” are going to think about shootings akin to the rampage shootings, not to things like domestic violence. The effect of which is to make supporters of this definition and the headlines it generates seem disingenuous. Almost as if they do not care about the actual state of violence in the US and are simply trying to characterize it as negatively as possible. A state of affairs that renders advocates of gun control less persuasive.
You cannot argue from what I have written (and perhaps this is just confusion because I am posting in a comment chain that includes other people replying to you) that I am drawing a moral distinction between the different types of violence I have so far described.
If there was a standard legal or academic definition of mass shooting, and this organization was using an alternate standard, I would see and support your point, but your argument is that in an ill defined space, one organizations definition isnt the same as yours, and is therefore wrong.
No. My argument is that the definition used to justify the headline is misleading because it is unlike what most people think when they hear the term “mass shooting” while at the same time it fails to make important distinctions between drastically different types of violence which ultimately require different policy approaches. I did not say the definition was wrong. Definitions are not right or wrong, they can be useful, they can be consistent with other ideas, they can be internally inconsistent, they can be vague, but it is meaningless to say a definition is wrong. Which is why I didn’t argue that this definition was wrong, the argument I made against the definition was that it is bad if you want to address the problems of firearm violence. Firstly because such problems require us to tailor solutions to the characteristics of the violence in question and secondly because if you want to be persuasive, you need people to trust you and misleading people is a surefire way to get people to not trust you.
You use this idea of ‘most people’ as some kind of yardstick, which it can’t be in any formal way. It’s sort a nothingism used to attack something with the weight of popular thinking, but not really a viable standard of any kind.
This would be more persuasive if there were not people in this very thread making the assumption that the article is about school shootings. I don’t know what “formal way” or “viable standard” is supposed to mean, but I have made very clear arguments for why the definition is bad in the context of policy design and persuasion. And it is of course totally reasonable to try to figure out lexical definitions for terms within specific populations. I sincerely doubt anyone involved in this discussion anticipates the definition of mass shooting commonly held by the public to be the specific one used to justify the headline’s claims. Clearly, as reactions in this very thread show, people don’t have the esoteric definition used to justify the articles headline in mind when they think about mass shootings. What? Are we just going to ignore the fact that terms have common, shared understandings now? In the context of policy as it ought to be applied in liberal democracy no less!
This article is a very good example of why current media is terrible.
This article is a summary of someone else’s work. It does not contain any news. Literally. It contains no new information, no original reporting, and adds nothing to the understanding of the situation in Florida one may glean from reading the CNN article the New Republic is ripping off. What is does is take the reporting done by CNN, which was far more even-keeled, and dresses it up in more incendiary language to outrage media consumers who want information that is consistent with what they already believe.
If you didn’t read the CNN article, this is what it did: A reporter at CNN interviewed several lawyers who had cases before Cannon. Those lawyers were asked what they thought about the judge and offered the following opinions:
The CNN article suggests that a a combination of some or all of factors 1-7 have made it easy for the defense in the Trump case to gum up the works and slow the progress of the trial down.
Most of these opinions are fairly anodyne. Many of them could describe almost any federal judge. Some of them even seem like good characteristics for a federal judge. (I think it is good, for example, that a federal judge requires prosecutors to back up their assertions and motions with specificity, rather than try to justify motions with generic claims.) Whats more is that none of these opinions would be particularly surprising to anyone who has been following the news surrounding Trump’s Florida trial. Nothing in the CNN reporting is particularly “damning” as the New Republic characterizes the report. The New Republic focuses on the strongest criticism of Cannon, but that criticism is the opinion of a single lawyer, and only represented a small portion of the overall report offered by CNN. If you only read the New Republic’s version, you would be forgiven for thinking that was the focus of the CNN article. In that case you would have an inaccurate view of the article, which is itself mostly a summary of opinions. I will also note that, when the New Republic was copying CNN’s homework, they ignored the praise defense lawyers had for Cannon. But I suppose if they had included the praise it would have been harder to call the article “damning”.
To put it plainly, the New Republic article is trash. It is a summary of someone else’s reporting that hypes up the most negative opinion about a federal judge, while ignoring the bulk of the same reporting.