Education Over Erasure
Let’s call our gun violence problem what it is - an epidemic
By: Devin Hughes and Dr. Caroline Light
Last month, Dr. Caroline Light and I published a Letter to the Editor in the Boston Globe responding to an op-ed by Dr. James Fox (which you can read here) that argued that mass shootings are not an epidemic, and that classifying them as such leads to bad policy.
We fundamentally disagree with these contentions. Further, they enable widespread disinformation about firearm violence. While we appreciate the Boston Globe for publishing our response, we want to use this space to expand on our critique of Dr. Fox’s arguments.
Dr. Fox’s article, “The myth of the mass shooting epidemic,” makes the following key claims:
He states that the “indiscriminate public slaughters that scare people the most” are rarer than people believe, and he believes that broader definitions of mass shootings — like that proposed by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) — misleadingly conflate injuries with deaths.
He proposes we limit the definition of mass shootings to public mass killings with a firearm that do not involve domestic violence, gang activity, or some other ongoing crime.
He claims that mass shootings should not be framed as an “epidemic” because of their rarity under his definition. According to Dr. Fox, the real epidemic is the “fear and worry” caused by overcounting mass shootings.
He claims that this “fear and worry” directly inspires bad policy, such as weakening concealed carry laws, hardening schools, and imposing active shooter drills on school children.
We agree with Dr. Fox on a few key points. When compared to the more than 40,000 annual gun deaths and thousands more injuries, mass shootings — regardless of how we define them — are relatively rare. Last year the GVA reported 503 mass shootings.
While they constitute just a small fraction of our nation’s firearm related deaths and injuries, the U.S. experiences significantly more mass shootings than other high income countries, including England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. In mass shootings, as with other gun-related violence, the U.S. is an extreme outlier among peer nations.
We also agree that weakening concealed carry laws, hardening schools, and promoting active shooter drills are ineffectual. Weakening concealed carry laws in particular is proven to cost even more lives.
But this is where our agreement with Dr. Fox ends.
There has never been a universally agreed-upon definition of “mass shooting.” Despite popular misconception, the FBI never proposed a formal definition. Instead, the agency defined “mass killing” as four or more people killed in one incident. In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, the FBI formalized “active shootings” to include incidents in which a perpetrator attempts to shoot multiple people in a populated area, such as a school, shopping center, or event venue. They also determined that such events did not involve the commission of another crime.
After the Sandy Hook tragedy, a fierce debate emerged over the definition of mass shootings. Some scholars, including Dr. Fox and John Lott, merged “active shooting” and “mass killing” together to formulate their definition of “mass shooting.” Whether intentional or not, such framing minimizes the impact of gun violence.
In 2014, the Gun Violence Archive, followed by a growing chorus of researchers in gun violence prevention, including Dr. Daniel Webster, defined “mass shooting” as an incident in which four or more people are shot. This more expansive definition has a number of advantages:
GVA’s approach is simple and straightforward. It follows the same definitional lineage of mass killing: “Mass” means four people, “killed” means killed, and “shooting” means shot.
GVA’s approach recognizes pre-existing definitions for “mass killing” and “active shooting,” and there is no reason to be duplicative. There is nothing to prevent Dr. Fox from using the terminology of “mass public killing with a firearm that is not a part of other criminal activity,” rather than trying to limit a pre-existing definition to fit his narrower focus.
GVA’s approach eschews political and moral questions on which incidents are worthy of consideration. If scholars and the public want to focus on a subset of overall mass shootings, that data is readily accessible.
The difference between death and injury in mass shootings is often a matter of millimeters and chance. Firearm injuries and the lifelong trauma they cause are too often overlooked by the national media.
If we exclude incidents in which someone survived their injuries, we are sweeping that pain under the rug rather than honestly addressing it.
Dr. Fox’s narrow framing also obscures the intensity of the threat of gun violence to public safety. Even if the intent of a shooter is not “indiscriminate public slaughter,” bystanders experience the extreme risk of being caught in the crossfire. Bullets fired in “gang shootings” do not only strike “gang members.” Bullets fired in domestic violence incidents do not spare people outside of the immediate family. Domestic violence calls are among the most dangerous calls to which police respond. There is also a close correlation between domestic violence and mass violence.
Definitionally erasing such incidents only hampers our ability to understand the broader context of gun violence, what causes mass casualty incidents, and the relative risk all these incidents pose to public safety.
Dr. Fox’s analysis of school shootings — particularly his distinction between shootings in classrooms versus those on school grounds — similarly misses the mark. Families of victims, along with the victims themselves, are unlikely to care whether they were shot on school grounds or inside the school. Why does it matter whether the shooter was seeking “indiscriminate slaughter” versus some other motivation?
People who are shot are part of the brutal calculus of gun violence, even if they survive their injuries. We should not diminish the effects of such tragedies in our efforts to understand their causes.
While Dr. Fox is correct that the exact location of such shootings does matter for school safety and security purposes, limiting the definition of mass shooting to exclude those shootings that don’t occur in classrooms, or that aren’t the product of “indiscriminate slaughter,” can only lead to bad policy. In excluding these events based on geography or intent, Dr Fox undermines his own argument. The recognition that shootings can occur outside the classroom, while still on school grounds, reveals the ineffectiveness of active shooter drills and school-hardening measures.
Similarly, excluding wide swaths of public shootings to focus only on those that match the public’s “fear and worry” is an act of semantic stinginess that distorts and minimizes the threat of gun violence.
When people are primarily worried about mass shootings, it is in large part due to our mainstream media — with help from the gun lobby — driving attention to those incidents. It is in the gun lobby’s interest to downplay the far more abundant incidents of gun violence, including suicide, gang violence, and domestic and family violence.
Limiting the definition of mass shootings to include only those with a high death count and a shooter intent on “indiscriminate slaughter” plays into the hands of a gun lobby intent on minimizing the deadly impact of the “guns everywhere” approach to policy.
The answer to public misconceptions about gun violence is education, not erasure. By calling for an artificial restriction on our view of mass shootings in the name of countering fear, Dr Fox undermines the very efforts he claims to support.
Indeed, his attempt to pin the blame for bad policies on those who use a more inclusive, value-neutral definition of mass shootings obfuscates the true root cause of those bad policies: the gun lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood campaign. The main driver of bad policy is disinformation that promotes the false claim that guns make us safer. We must fight disinformation with transparency and careful attention to the wider effects of gun violence.
Instead of narrowing the range of incidents that count as “mass shootings,” we stand with the researchers and data experts who illuminate the fullest picture in the name of public education and safety. Informing the public about all forms of mass shootings — along with the contexts in which they take place — is essential to more effective prevention measures.
The real villain here is disinformation, not those honestly collecting data in the interest of public education and gun violence prevention. Those who exclude incidents from their research should clarify their intentions to avoid erasure and enabling disinformation. To do otherwise is to contribute to the Firehose of Falsehood, feeding the very policies Dr. Fox claims to despise.
Devin Hughes is the Founder and President of GVPedia.
Dr. Caroline Light is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.
The United States does not have A gun violence problem. Rather it has multiple problems that manifest themselves with violence too often with a gun. The problem with lumping all these manifestations under the single term "gun violence" is that it makes finding a workable solution to each of the separate problems much more difficult.