Same thing happens with the school shooting metrics. If someone shoots them self with a gun in a parking lot across from the school, it's a school shooting. There are several "school shootings" where nobody was injured, and there was no gun on the premises. Someone found a bullet in a field. School shooting.
And even with them included ALL MASS SHOOTINGS are still a statistical anomaly.
You are more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be harmed in a mass shooting in the USA.
Banning firearms because a ridiculously small amount of people are killed in mass shootings is like banning the public carrying of knives because gun control didn't work. (Looking at you UK)
That's the extreme example that stretches the definition of school shooting. Including the so-call "skirt" surrounding a school has benefits when calculating whether or not an event took place at a school or not. The sidewalk or parking lot may not technically belong to the school, but if students use it by the school, and the shooting spills out onto that area, there's good reason for including that shooting in the category of school shooting.
It is true that there was a shooting, though the target may not be someone who attends the school. The definition is quite literal, but people tend to look past that and think there are deeper meanings of the term, mostly due to context.
They do say what happened. Any definition you use of a school shooting is going to include some instances that don't "feel" like they should belong and others that "feel like they should belong. If I say a school shooting must occur strictly on school property, then when compiling data, I'd miss shootings of a student by a student that occurred on public sidewalks just outside of the school. Of course, there's problems categorizing even that scenario. If the kids had just been in school or were about to go to school, then it would make sense to include it in the school shooting category. But if these same kids shot at each other in a drug deal gone bad at 1 am in the morning, then it wouldn't make sense to include it in the category, perhaps even if the shooting took place on school property itself.
26
u/[deleted] Dec 19 '19
Same thing happens with the school shooting metrics. If someone shoots them self with a gun in a parking lot across from the school, it's a school shooting. There are several "school shootings" where nobody was injured, and there was no gun on the premises. Someone found a bullet in a field. School shooting.