As my boy drove away from our house and toward the first day of his last year of high school, another boy, nearly a thousand miles away in Georgia, was putting a monstrous plan into action.
For all the horror mass shootings in the United States engender, they are far from shocking. And even as I pored over a jumble of confusing reporting, I was only shocked by one thing: The New York Times called it only the THIRD mass shooting of the year.
The other two it noted were:
Fordyce, Ark.: A gunman killed four people and wounded nine on June 21 at the Mad Butcher grocery store in a town of 3,400 people, about 70 miles south of Little Rock. Two police officers were injured in the attack, and the shooter was also wounded.
Forest Park, Ill.: A man fatally shot four passengers on September 2 as they slept on an L train in the Chicago suburbs, according to the authorities.
How could that be, I wondered as my fingers tapped furiously at the keyboard. Intent as I was ordering up facts and figures from various internet searches that would not put as fine a point on it: Because I hadn’t been keeping track of gun violence. I hadn’t been able to commit the daily atrocities to my long-term memory. But in combing the Gun Violence Archive, I understood in painful detail the GVA had reported 385 mass shootings in the United States in 2024 up to our district’s first full day of classes on Sept. 5.
Learning then that, as defined by the paper of record, “mass shootings” will only be counted as such if they occur in public places, claim at least four lives, and are the only crime associated with the occurrence. … So if a school shooter kills three students and injures 40, or a bank robber shoots all the customers in line behind him after he passes the teller his note … they probably won’t fall within NYT’s mass shooting rubric.
GVA’s rubric for mass shootings seems a little different: Their accounting groups the crimes as a type of incident regardless of where they take place – public, private, workplace, family annihilations, gang disputes – but wherein a minimum of four people are shot, regardless of whether the victims are injured or killed.
Among the dozens of shootings listed in GVA’s six-page spreadsheet covering the calendar year until this point, was a May 11th incident at a May Day celebration in Stockton, Alabama where an argument in a crowd of over a 1,000 set off a series of gunshots that killed three and injured 15 other festival goers. Another incident on the same day, this one in a Louisville, Kentucky nightclub, cost two people their lives and two others sustained multiple gunshot injuries.
Neither were counted in the newspaper’s tally of mass shootings. Nor did it register a shooting in a Rochester, NY, park on July 28th that killed two and injured five others who were among hundreds who had gathered in a crowded park to enjoy the warm weather as well as an all-day gathering that had not required a permit. A separate shooting incident in the same park, this one in June, after the park was closed, injured six people.
For whatever reason, The New York Times even discounted a shooting that killed 8 people in Joliet, Texas in January. That shooting occurred in two separate homes but was only discovered after the suspected gunman – who authorities believed had been related to all of the victims – died by suicide.
It must be merely a matter of time before we praise these omissions as some weird proof that thoughts and prayers can keep us safe from gun violence.
Because the truth is as long as we focus on protecting guns for use just about everywhere, our famiilies and their families will never be safe anywhere.
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