The shooting I refer to is of course this one for those not familiar with American history. Is there a definition of “massacre”?
Yes, there is.
And here’s a discussion of the word.
The Boston one was probably called something else in England.
ETA: “The incident on King Street.”
IMHO, a massacre has to involve a substantial number of victims, and in a totally lopsided way. Opinions seem to be divided on whether or not the killed people need to be innocent - I’ve seen plenty of instances of military combat where it’s said that one side got “massacred” even though they were belligerents, not innocents (i.e., “Carthage massacred the Romans at Cannae.”)
A massacre is either 56-3 or 7-0, depending on the shape of the ball.
Apparently, back in the old days Americans actually cared when unarmed people were killed by State agents, even if it was only three of them (and one wasn’t even white!).
Don’t look to the dictionary for an answer to such a loaded word. Paul Revere called it a massacre. John Adams called it self-defense. So, who do you agree with? A propagandist or a lawyer. If an unbiased journalist named the event, it would have been called a “shooting” like how the one at Kent State was named.
It was merely the taming of an unruly mob.
The word can be used rather figuratively, so a “massacre” might be many or few people killed, or none at all. We had a “massacre” on a Saturday night a few years back in which two political people resigned, a third got fired, and a fourth suffered sufficient backlash (among other pressures) that he quit too not long after.
And wasn’t there an earlier fatal conflict between colonists and troops?
If by troops you mean redcoats, I don’t think so. In North Carolina, a handful of colonists were killed in battle or hanged during the Regulator Insurrection but unlike the mob in Boston, those killed were active combatants taking up arms against the King’s representatives whose troops were also mostly colonists.