Stephen Dinan has a new article that extensively discusses our recent research on Mass Public Shooters. While we greatly appreciate the piece, there are a couple points that could be clearer.
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— Our definition of mass public shootings is not arbitrary. As we note in our report, “The FBI active shooting reports concentrate on shootings that occur in public and do not involve some other crime such as robbery. Traditionally, the FBI has classified “mass” as four or more people being murdered. Academic studies have used a similar definition.”
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— The Gun Violence Archive says that they looked at four or more people injured and/or killed, but they do include instances with three or more injured. And injured is not the same as wounded.
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The national gun control debate focuses heavily on AR-15-style rifles, but handguns have been used in most mass public shootings over the past 25 years, according to myth-busting data from the Crime Prevention Research Center.
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“GVA’s position is simple. We mark up each gun violence incident based on the criteria it presents,” he said. “Mass Shooting is just 6% of the work we collect, and whether you call it mass shooting or not, the same number of people were shot in the same number of incidents.”
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Stephen Dinan, “Data shows most mass public shooters used handguns, not ‘assault rifles’,” Washington Times, February 4, 2024.