Tracking Gun Violence

Apparently, there have been more mass shootings in the United States this year than there have been days. This statistic has been widely circulated by news and social media, and is the type of thing that makes people feel a certain way about the welfare of this country. It is also the type of thing that spurs debate over categories and definitions, their purposes, and their consequences.

There is a dispute over what you want to classify as a "mass shooting," and definitions can vary widely. The Mass Shooting Tracker, the source of the more-shootings-than-days figure, counts incidents with four or more people shot as mass shootings; as of today—December 31st, 2015—the organization has documented 370 mass shootings this year. There is a much lower statistic, 25, provided by USA Today—which maintains its own reporter-compiled list, and has a stricter classification threshold: four or more people killed, not including the perpetrator(s). Mother Jones, meanwhile, focuses only on incidents "in which the motive appeared to be indiscriminate killing" and excludes cases of gang activity and domestic violence. Their tally is the lowest: 4 mass shootings in 2015.

Chronologically, the first of these definitions comes from the FBI—specifically, from a 2005 Bureau-hosted symposium on serial murder, where various experts on serial killers consolidated their findings. The report was eventually released by the Behavioral Analysis Unit, a division of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime that specializes in behavioral science. For FBI agents who study psychology and criminology, a distinction is made between serial murderers like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer from mass murderers—like Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook shooting.

The FBI definiton serves an academic function. It was actually meant to clarify what constitutes a serial killer for the specialists who analyze serial killer pathology. And definitions made for one purpose are not always still valid for another.

So if you're just trying to come to a conclusion about gun violence—and not putting together psychological profiles—is the FBI definition of "mass murder" still appropriate? A few organizations have used that definition to assess mass shootings, disregarding how it was originally made for fairly unrelated reasons. The Congressional Research Service, USA Today, and Mother Jones all cite the FBI when explaining their methodologies for counting mass shootings.

CRS compiled a report in July 2015 called Mass Murder with Firearms: Incidents and Victims, 1999-2013—as the title suggests, it focuses specifically on incidents involving firearms. It cites the FBI definition of "mass murder," and then goes on to define two new terms: "mass shooting" and "mass public shooting." A logical step is taken to designate mass shootings as, simply, mass murders with guns.

It is important to consider the intended audience for each of these organizations. CRS is a research arm of the U.S. Congress; its reports are meant to inform congressional decisions. CRS is intended to supply information exclusively to lawmakers, and its reports—though largely non-confidential—are not released to the public. (In fact, this document was only made available by the Federation of American Scientists, a non-profit that, among other projects, contests government secrecy.) Meanwhile, the tallies of mass shootings provided by Mass Shooting Tracker, the Gun Violence Archive, USA Today, and Mother Jones are meant to inform the public.

Mass Shooting Tracker was a crowdsourced catalogue of shooting incidents, now consolidated with the Gun Violence Archive. The latter is similarly crowdsourced, though perhaps less fervently: it documented 329 incidents this year, compared to Mass Shooting Tracker's 370. But discrepancies of this scale can be inevitable for crowdsourced efforts. The full list of 370 documented mass shootings from Mass Shooting Tracker is still available at r/GunsAreCool, the sarcastically-named subreddit that created the tracker. (N.b. the list here ends at 372; this is a counting error, there are 370 entries.)

The methodology used by Mass Shooting Tracker and the Gun Violence Archive is unlike the others, though the FBI is again referenced. The moderators of r/GunsAreCool explain that, since the FBI definition of "mass murder" is four or more people murdered in one event, "it is therefore only logical that a Mass Shooting is four or more people shot in one event." It should also be noted that the Gun Violence Archive concerns itself with all firearm-related incidents, regardless of how many injuries or deaths result. Reports involving four or more people shot are then repeated on another list.

Meanwhile, USA Today adheres to the FBI's definition fairly strictly. Their yearly counts of mass shootings go back to 2006, and closely match the tallies documented in the CRS report.

But Mother Jones has an especially interesting way of narrowing their criteria. All other definitions are essentially quantitative; Mother Jones takes qualitative factors into consideration, focusing on a specific type of mass shooting that has a very particular public resonance.

From all of the shootings that have occurred this year—the 370 reported by Mass Shooting Tracker, the 329 from Gun Violence Archive, the 25 from USA Today, the unknown number of shootings unreported—Mother Jones has classified 4 as mass shootings. Editor Mark Follman has explained that while organizing shooting incidents based on the number of victims could be helpful for estimating "a blunt measure of gun violence," the shooting incidents counted by Mother Jones belong to "a unique phenomenon that must be understood on its own."

And there is something distinct about that phenomenon, that sets it apart from less-reported shootings.

The Mother Jones definition gets at the nature of the problem. The phenomenon of the American mass shooting is more than just an incident that meets certain terrible criteria. It has accumulated a particular mythos: the lone white male perpetrator, castigated by his peers and feeling denied of the privileges commonly afforded to others of his race and gender becomes overwhelmed by his anger and isolation and untreated psychological maladies and, armed with a legally (though irresponsibly) obtained weapon, shoots up a school. Afterwards, the country enters into a debate about gun control and mental health that inevitably goes nowhere. Sometimes there are two shooters, or the shooter is female, or a person of color, or acquired a firearm through illegal means. Sometimes it happens at a movie theater, at a Sikh temple, at an IHOP. The details are incidental.

On July 23, 2015, John Russell Houser opened fire in a theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. He killed Mayci Breaux, 21, and Jillian Johnson, 33. He injured 9 others, and then he shot himself. Because of the number of fatalities—two victims, one perpetrator—this event is not counted as a mass shooting by USA Today or Mother Jones. It would not be considered a mass shooting by the Congressional Reporting Service.

But the shooting in Lafayette is exactly the kind of mass shooting incident that pervades the American imagination and haunts its conscience. Houser was a lone white gunman, and had suffered from bipolar disorder. He had become estranged from his family, and had previously voiced admiration for Timothy McVeigh. Despite a history of domestic violence and mental health disturbances, he was allowed to legally purchase a gun. In the aftermath, Houser's opinion of Barack Obama became the subject of a politicized argument.

The cultural concept of the American mass shooting is best defined not with quantitative criteria, but with a particular feeling. And feelings are hard to count.

Here is the heart of the matter: how best do we frame these numbers to argue for or against gun control? Interest in gun control, estimated roughly here with data from Google Trends, doesn't always rise in response to shooting deaths. It does, however, correlate with the sort of events that fit neatly into the shape of the mass shooting narrative.

And here is another question: why do these particular shootings, as rare as they are, provoke so much more fear and anxiety in the American consciousness than shootings of the non-mass variety? Even with the generous definition used by Mass Shooting Tracker and the Gun Violence Archive, mass shootings account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths. Why are certain deaths given more attention while others are ignored?

Some hypotheses:

• Mass shootings are more rare. Rare occurrences are often perceived as more interesting.
• Mass shootings take place in public (or semi-public) venues—schools, clinics, churches. They bring out the it could happen to me genre of disquiet.
• Speaking of it could happen to me, there’s something about the arbitrariness of victims that marks them as especially innocent. Public mourning tends to require that victims be innocent: see, for instance, the response to the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting, where some commentators withheld their sympathy for women whom they considered murderers.

It is, ultimately, a question of which lives have more political value.