"Your dead kids don't trump my Constitutional rights"

Great Debates
301

Your question brings to mind a series of clips that appeared on The Daily Show a week or two ago. It was comprised of clips of media commentary following yet another mass shooting, with rhetorical questions like “why is this happening?”, “how could this happen again?”, “what can we do about this?” etc. The subtext was something like, “yeah, let’s just ignore what every other country in the world did a long time ago and keep beating our heads against the wall trying to figure out this total mystery.”

Another image from The Daily Show that I wish I could post: a map of the US with a symbol marking every school shooting that has occurred since Newtown. Imagine a map of the US that is so cluttered with symbols that you can barely see anything else.

Any other questions?

302

Do you mean this map?

303

Probably. Are you trying to claim via that article that the chart is “made up”? Is this “made up” too? How about this?

The funny thing about that article in the right-wing National Review that tries to discredit the chart is that it then goes on to claim, without qualification, that gun violence has been dropping. But they forgot to mention that most of that decline was in the 90s, and that coincided with dropping overall crime rates all over the western world due to various demographic factors (they also forgot to mention that mass shootings are on the increase). It has nothing to do with guns one way or the other; the US still has by far more guns per capita than any other industrialized country, and – not surprisingly – by far more gun deaths than any other industrialized country. By any comparative standard, gun violence remains the huge epidemic it has been for years. Seems to me the National Review is engaging in some major spin in favor of the gun crowd.

304

Nope, just misleading.

305

Is this a game? Would I have to imagine it, because it doesn’t exist?

CNN who reported the figure from Everytown, backed away from the report because it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

306

Not so, per your cite. They draw a different line to their original reporting - school shootings similar to the Newtown or Oregon events rather than school shootings in general - but I don’t see where they’re claiming the report doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

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The thing is, Everytown was trying to convey the message that there have been 74 school shootings since Newtown. The impression the reader gets is that Newtown type shootings are occurring that many times. If you aren’t drawing that inference, that’s fine, but IMO it’s clear that’s what they are trying to do.

CNN reported the story, as did many other outlets. After they reviewed it, they backed away from the original figure and reported what people were really interested in. The type of school shooting like Newtown or Oregon. Those number 15. 74 doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If it did, there would be no reason for them to come out and report the 15 figure.

Don’t get me wrong. 15 fucking sucks. The Everytown message would have been more effective if they just reported those. Instead, the story is about how Everytown are if not outright liars, they deliberately misled. You may feel differently - you may think they were totally open and honest. I wonder if there has been a poll, but my take is they come out looking worse and the topic they are trying to highlight gets buried.

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It’s not the inference I draw, and I don’t believe we can assume it’s the inference we’re meant to draw, either. For a very simple reason. If the idea was that they were attempting to deliberately portray the situation as being worse than it was - that is, they were suggesting that 74 Newtown-type school shootings occurred because those types of shootings are much worse than other kinds, and thereby likely to engender more sympathy/shock/interest in their ideas - it’s unnecessary. I’m all those things to, well, school shootings. To murder in general, really (although I understand at least one item on their list was a suicide, and that, at least, I’d say they shouldn’t have counted). For the purposes of making me think “Shit, this is way too high a number of deaths!”, presumably their aim, “74 school shootings” is enough for that.

I don’t know whether the thought processes behind the selection and framing of that number were closer to yours or to mine. But I would suspect, given that loosely I’m probably closer to their overall principles, that it might well be mine. Or at least that it’s possible enough that it isn’t “clear what they were trying to do”.

They didn’t back away from the original figure. They report the original figure in the article you cite. They still call it a school shootings figure. They report the number of Newtown-type shootings because, certainly, a lot of people said that’s the only kind they were interested in, but I don’t see how that’s backing away from it. They didn’t repudiate it. They didn’t suggest it was wrong. They didn’t say “We reported the number as this, when in actual fact the answer was this.” They did the equivalent of saying “Hey, this is the total number, and this is the number of this type of shooting, since you’re asking.”

Personally, I feel like the blowback against this number often seems to frame the complainers as people who only care about school shootings of that particular type. Or who think that shootings over drugs, or between gangs, somehow “don’t count” as something we should look to try and solve. That it’s misleading because Newtown-type shootings we have to try and figure out a way to stop - other kinds? Eh. That’s not true of all the complainers, of course. And to be quite fair, I think you could look at some of the bad impression being given off as just bad phrasing or inarticulate sentiments.

I don’t feel like Everytown deliberately misled, because I can easily believe they collected together “school shootings since Newtown” as a result of - well, shootings in school since Newtown happened. That they might consider a wide range of shootings at school to be bad things. That they might think, as I do, that we don’t have to take it to the level of a massacre for it to be concerning. Perhaps they don’t think as I do. But they easily could. And I don’t see any reason to assume malicious falsehood on their part - at least, not beyond that assumed of any advocacy group.

309

Inevitably I think of the simplest way to put it beyond the editing time. Bah.

I don’t hear “school shooting” and immediately picture Newtown, or Columbine, or Dunblane, for something a little closer to home. I picture someone getting shot at school. And I don’t see any reason to assume that the Everytown people couldn’t think that way, too.

310

Like I said, you may be right - but I don’t think you are.

Politifact says:

(my bold)

Further:

You said suicides shouldn’t be counted, that represents 8% of the figure. I don’t know how you feel about other categories, but there were also incidents of random folks committing suicide in a school parking lot in the middle of the night. Or an armed robbery unrelated to the school driving through campus. Should those not have been counted as well?

When introducing the chart, Everytown says, “we should feel secure in sending our children to school — comforted by the knowledge that they’re safe.”, but just under half of the incidents they include are at colleges or universities. Not exactly children.

You may believe they didn’t deliberately mislead. Their claims have been evaluated as ‘mostly false’ from Politifact. The caveats to their figure is now reported in any mention of the figure because without them it is misleading. The story is not the shittiness of actual school shootings, but instead about how the 74 figure must be interpreted in context, and about Everytown itself. Do you think that’s the aspect of story they wanted out there?

311

And I just noticed I didn’t link the Politifact article. It’s here.

312

So what is it that you think that every other country has done that we could successfully do here? (BTW, are Switzerland and Israel part of “every other country”?)

Banning guns is one frequently suggested “solution” (which implies that we have the political ability to amend the constitution). Of course our criminals are very well armed (this was not the case in many other countries that decided to ban firearms) so some people on the gun rights side think that this could yield bad results.

AFAICT, “every other country” never had that many guns to begin with. We’ve got one for every man woman and child plus enough left over to arm a small army.

I also am puzzled why they felt the need to puff up the numbers unless they are trying to feed hysteria and fear.

Aside from shootings that are in self defense, I don’t think anyone in this argument wants a number higher than zero but people aren’t thiking about shootings in shitty neighborhoods by criminals, or suicides, or shootings taht occur in the vicinity of colleges.

I had a conversation with a former colleauge of mine and she was near hysterical about her fear that her 10 year old would get shot and killed like the kids in Newtown (she started welling up in tears thinking about the possibility of her children being shot) and she had gotten the impression that this was more than a remote possibility in the suburbs of Menlo Park. She didn’t know what the facts were or what the answers were but she was supporting the folks who were telling her that her children were in danger if she didn’t support them and send them money.

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More than I’d heard! I agree with you; I don’t feel that these should “count”, though they’re still situations that we’d want to look into trying to reduce, as I know you’d agree. I think there’s still a little overlap in terms of access, maybe… but I think the prime difference for me, at least as pertains specifically to guns, is that they’re not as helpful a tool for that purpose as they can be for shooting others. It’s theoretically just as “easy” to kill oneself in many other ways, so while it’s certainly a mental health and support issue, I wouldn’t consider it a “gun” issue, if that makes sense to you.

Are you not counting those suicides as part of the overall suicide category? I think I would. As for events unrelated to school specifically, I think I’d need to look into them each specifically, but if people were killed or injured by gunfire on campus, I think I would call them school shootings, yes, even if it was an unrelated robbery.

Eh, again, I’m not so persuaded by that. I’ve certainly heard parents of university-age children refer to them as their children. Especially, depressingly enough - when they’ve been killed at those places. I don’t find it at all strange that a group that looks into and advocates against school shootings would use that language. Nor, frankly, would I consider it wrong to use that kind of language even if we were looking at, say, half school shootings and half shootings at a places of work.

But they reported those “caveats”. As your cite points out, this isn’t something they had to go and look up themselves - Everytown wrote up all those shootings. They provided their methodology. They explained their definitions. If they wanted to mislead, if they didn’t want people discovering their “misrepresentations”, then that’s doubly counter-productive to their aims. Too, again as your cite says, they didn’t count all the school shootings they could’ve done, giving one example of what I would think even the harshest critic of Everytown would likely call a “school shooting” of the Newtown type that they didn’t include because of their methodology. Again, if their intention was to mislead, to “pad the numbers” dishonestly, why didn’t they include that one? If they’re deliberately intending to mislead, and knew that, say, a suicide on campus wouldn’t have the same impact as the idea that it might instead be a school shooting, why would they include something that (to them, us assuming poor motives) was wildly divergent and not include something that they’d think less controversial? These make no sense from a malicious standpoint. Theydo make sense from a standpoint of that being how their methodology worked out.

Do I think Everytown wanted people to be discussing the context of that number and themselves? Of course I don’t. But they released that context, and before the complaints. They opened up and explained their methods. They didn’t act, in other words, as guilty, misleading, malicious liars do - except if we assume that their definition of “school shootings” does not differ to those who complained, and we have no reason to believe that’s true, since there are those who would agree with their definitions.

314

Aren’t they? I agree with you on suicides. But if a school shooting happens in a shitty neighourhood - it’s a school shooting. If a school shooting is done by criminals - I’m not entirely sure which school shooting aren’t done by criminals, but whatever, that’s a school shooting. If a shooting is done on a college campus - that’s a school shooting.

I am one person who sees school shootings almost exactly (minus the suicides) as Newtown does. Why is it so impossible, why is it so incredibly unlikely that Newtown believe the same as me, that not only can we suggest they’re liars but say they certainly are?

You wouldn’t call me a liar or a misrepresenter about what I would define a school shooting, I would hope. Why so them?

315

Yes, in fact, Switzerland and Israel are. And if you look at their gun laws, just like every other civilized country, they both have strong gun laws. Switzerland is often cited as a fine example of a country with a lot of guns but a low gun death rate – they do have a lot of guns because ownership is actually mandatory as a form of military service, but even so only about half the number per capita as the US. Most importantly, they have the kind of gun laws governing ownership, storage, and transportation that most US politicians are terrified to even talk about, for fear of retaliation from the NRA.

This is indeed a problem – a huge one, and will likely remain so for a long time, the tragic legacy of the failure of the National Firearms Act of 1934 to enact meaningful controls while it was still possible. But you have to start somewhere, and many many opportunities to pass even minor legislation since then have failed, and the NRA keeps getting stronger. This is the cycle that has to be broken, IMHO.

316

Actually in their release, Everytown did disclose the method they used, but not the detail of each event. I wouldn’t say they were hiding the basis for their tally since each item was able to be discovered. But I do think they wanted to put out a soundbite of 74 school shootings. They wanted the President to be able to say, one per week. They wanted people like wolfpup to be able to say,* “a map of the US with a symbol marking every school shooting that has occurred since Newtown. Imagine a map of the US that is so cluttered with symbols that you can barely see anything else.”* But like Politifact - I look at that and think, that’s inaccurate and mostly false. This section sums up my thoughts:

(my bold)

If Everytown wants to call an unaffiliated person driving onto a school parking lot in the middle of the night when no students or school employee is present who commits suicide a school shooting based on the definition they use, they are free to do so. If they want to include accidental (negligent) discharge as a school shooting they are free to do so. I think it weakens their message and makes it about their credibility, and raises questions like I am that they are intentionally misleading folks - or putting out soundbytes that are mostly false.

317

Again, though; I agree, mostly, with that number. I think it is accurate. From what you cite right there, Everytown specifically say that they believe school shootings that aren’t like Newtown are also worth including and looking at. They didn’t put out the numbers by your definition - but just because they didn’t use your definition doesn’t mean that secretly they agree with you and therefore are being deliberately misleading.

Again, you’re phrasing it as if they do not truly believe that these are “school shootings” by their own definitions. If I start talking about football, and say that most American teams are terrible in a world context - someone might come back at me and say what nonsense that is, the NFL is the best football league with the best teams in the world! Clearly I am a liar or misleading people by saying such things. But if I’m talking about soccer, or Aussie rules, if that’s what I mean by soccer, then there’s no lying, and no misleading intended. It is unreasonable to judge what someone says by how you define words when they have already made it clear their definition differs from yours.

And that’s the argument, seemingly. “When I hear school shootings, I picture Newtown - therefore so do Everytown, which means they’re misrepresenting the numbers!” Not everyone does. And if you start from the idea that Everytown do not define school shootings as you do, then there is no misrepresentation.

If you want to argue that your definition of “school shootings” is better, more accurate for these purposes, or in some other way more useful, that’s perfectly fine. What isn’t ok is to say your definition is better, and therefore everyone must agree with it. And that’s what has to be said to say Newtown are not only misleading, but clearly doing so. So far as I can tell, they wanted to put out a soundbite of 74 school shootings - yes. Because they think that’s the correct number, by a definition that they agree with.

318

I guess I don’t put gang violence in schools in the same category as Newtown. All unjustified gun deaths are a tragedy but we are making up the definition of a term here and linking it with incidents like Newtown and Columbine. I think they are trying to feed hysteria and fear. Its not like the gun rights side doesn’t do the same thing but they get called out on it and so should the gun control side.

I didn’t suggest they are liars. I suggested they were expanding the definition beyond the common understanding in order to puff up the numbers. Perhaps that was not their intent but it seems like a forseeable result.

How do you feel about shootings that occur in school parking lots at night when students aren’t around?

So is that what you think every other country is doing? Allowing (or requiring)their citizens have guns but regulating them tightly?

Start somewhere? You realize there are at least half a dozen other gun control laws passed since the NFA, right? the fact that some efforts don’t succeed doesn’t mean that the NRA has been having its way with congress.

When fashioning gun control, we cannot ignore the effect of all the guns that are already in circulation and we especially cannot ignore the effect of all the guns that are currently in criminal hands. We should also consider all benefits of legal gun ownership in society cmpared to he cost of legal gun ownership in society.

Why is a gang related shooting that takes place in a school parking lot at 9 pm any different than a gang related shooting around the corner from the school?

But if you knew that most people who heard you would immediately think you wre talking about real football, it would be misleading, woudln’t it.

319

So that’s what a well regulated militia looks like.

320

If they are linking them with Newtown and Columbine, sure - but why can’t the link be “shootings in school”? Given that that’s explicitly what they’ve claimed? And given that that means they’ve not included at least one incident of what I’d imagine even you would call a “school shooting” because it didn’t match with their methodology? That’s not the act of a group desperate to puff up the numbers. It’s entirely consistent with a group sticking to their honest definitions, though.

It is unreasonable to not only hold people to your standards when they don’t claim to agree with them, but also to declare that in fact they aren’t just wrong, per you, but maliciously deceptive.

You don’t believe a deliberate misrepresentation counts as a lie? You don’t think “puffing the numbers” is lying? If so, fair enough, I’ll withdraw that point. Beyond that, though - on what basis are you calling *your *definition the “common understanding”, and is it the same basis you’re using to assume their understanding matches it?

I feel like they’re a bad thing that we should try and stop, mostly. Something that would certainly fall under the overall umbrella of gun control arguments (and crime, violence, etc). And that a shooting that occurs at a school is reasonably referred to as a “school shooting”.

Because one of them fits into the category “school shooting”, and the other does not. Because one of them is a shooting not at a school, while the other is a shooting at a school. There’s a case to be made for the targets/shooters identities, the backdrop to the shooting in terms of missed shots, and so on for the corner, too, but I suspect that’s not what you’re asking about.

I don’t agree that that is “known”, frankly. But even if it was - if I’m saying at the same time, “Hey, by the way, when I talk about football, I’m talking about that soccer game, no pads and things like that, currently there’s the World Cup going on”, even if every person around me would have thought I was talking about American football, they would certainly have no reason to think I was thanks to my explanations, right? Like how Everytown set out their methodology, the data of their numbers, and their definitions along with their report?

For a group attempting a massive deception, they’ve been remarkably open and clear about what they’re talking about. The sole argument against how they went about this seems to be, “Well, they didn’t read my mind and know that I wouldn’t agree with their definition or read the definition they provided! Those tricksy devils!”