A whole classroom just wiped off the face of the earth.

[Model35mech]

8. A decade ago I spent a lot of time on trying to understand mass shootings

And I posted a lot of what I found on this very site, and under the username Heresince1628, I suffered very much abuse for pointing out things that many people didn't want to read.

One of the things that stood out to me was that there was a group of mass shootings that often involved the combination of gun-killings of a large number of people followed by suicide by cop. In the stuff I read, and that didn't go back beyond the late 1950's, back then the combination of mass killing & suicide was significantly biased as an American thing. To my knowledge there is as yet no good analysis of why that is.

There could be good reasons for that. Although we think of mass shootings as common, when the individual events are screened carefully so as to match definitions of mass-shootings and mass-killings, relatedness of victims, presence of organized crime/gangs is stratified it turns out they really aren't so common, and they come in relatively small numbers, often under 30, a critical threshold for traditional statistics. That's good in one way, we can breathe because they are sort of rare compared to individual murders, but it's also bad because large datasets really are necessary in order to detect important but small signals that could help explain what's going on.

One of many difficulties I noticed for doing any serious analysis of mass shootings/mass killings was the incompleteness of data. LE organizations didn't seem to pursue these things actively after a month or so but left them 'open' hoping something will pop up and make sense of what seemed senseless. Newspapers rely on LE for facts and are even less patient to develop deeper understanding before public interest wains. Comparisons of trends in mass-shootings/mass-killings is pursued by a well qualified but comparatively small number of experts. If they can produce a book, then a magazine show might pick up and tell the story of that.

It all remains a terrible muddle. The definitions of mass shootings and mass killings vary from place to place and from reporting institution/media to reporting institution/media. Statistics that mix together "apples and oranges" don't really provide rigorous insight.

Obviously, definitions of mass shootings and mass killings are distinguished by the larger number of dead than in simple murders. But the threshold for counting may vary in the number of people dead plus fatally wounded (or not) and some include and some do not include numbers of people with non-life threatening wounds.

Another problem is that there is a tendency for older institutions to not include gang related 'mass-shootings', while younger institutions do. While the FBI and HSD may have good reasons for separating organized crime and terrorism from the general stats, the general public doesn't. And bigger numbers provide more sizzle in stories and get more clicks.

Some reporting centers don't include mass-shootings that involve related family members. This is something of a hold-over from epidemiology and its avoidance of doing analysis when the victims of an illness all attended the same family reunion. The cause is seen as something internal to the family and not a broader threat to the community.

In today's reporting on CBS that stressed there were more mass shootings than days of the year so far in 2022, CBS included gang related shootings, which inflated their count compared to the Mass Shooter Database project, and the Violence project which do not include gang and organized crime related multiple shootings/killings.

One of the most common puzzling problems is the shooters' mental wellness. Although the NRA and it's conservative supporters want to blame the "monsters out there" it turns out that a bit more than 1/3 of the mass shootings (including shootings assumed to be gang and organized crime) are never linked to an identified killer. Consequently NOTHING can really be confidently known about the patterns in 60% of the shooters mental health status. Nonetheless claims that each shooter, known or unknown were mentally ill are made in reports of almost ALL multiple-shootings.