Remember: New definition of “mass shooting” is “four or more people hit by bullets”. Remember that when they trot the totals out. If JJ shoots Pookie, Ice Dog, and Ray-Ray, and one of them manages to wing him back with return fire, that’s a “mass shooting”.
(They’re counting the Virginia News Crew as a mass shooting because white reporters count as two ordinary people.)
Hopefully Tam won’t mind if you borrow that argument for all your lefty friends who are posting this crap on Facebook about 355 mass shootings this year.
Even worse, the 355 mass shootings number is crowd-sourced from a virulently anti-gun subsection of Reddit, of which a cursory exam of the data showed much of it to be unsourced, overblown,or misrepresented.
Source here
From the Washington Post:
It basically underscores what was already mentioned. Obama gets awarded two “Pinocchios” for his inconsistent claims about mass shootings. At the root of it is how a mass shooting is characterized by scholarly research and/or the federal government.
Has anyone gone back and re evaluated data from the 80’s and 90’s regarding “mass”shootings of 4 or more people to see if they are actually more prevalent now than 10, 15, 20, or even 30 years ago?
I think it would be interesting to see, assuming that data is actually available.
Here’s how they get to 355 “mass shootings” this year:
One “mass shooting” = “four or more people hit by bullets”.
San Bernadino has a reported 14 dead, 17 injured, not counting the two shooters, and assuming there were no white reporters (who, according to Tam, count double). So totalled out: 33 people (14 + 17 + 2).
33 / 4 = 8.25, which we’ll round down to eight to account for the “four or more” in the definition of “mass shooting”.
So eight “mass shootings” get added to the list.
No, there’s an actual list, and I’ve looked at it.
They’re not counting “each multiple of four people”, just “four or more”.
The list has huge problems, as mentioned, but “simply inflating things by counting one incident as multiple for each four” is not one of them.
Oh, I know. That was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. I guess I need to label my snark better. ;)
I hate to be that guy but long bare links royally screw up the formatting of the comment section, and force comment text under hard-coded elements.
It’s really easy to prevent this, by using minor code to shorten the link; the code is as follows, replacing “[” and “]” with “” respectively:
[a href=”PASTE YOUR LINK HERE”]WRITE YOUR TEXT HERE[/a]
This allows you to insert a link in your text, to the front page of this blog for example, and have the link attached to part of your comment in a way that doesn’t mess with the formatting.
Blog management seems to have the ability to do it after the fact, but doing so takes away from time that would be better spent on other things, such as writing new content…..
My theme should really handle that. It’s a long-running bug. Sadly I customized this theme so much, it was probably fixed long ago and I just never got the update. Someday I’ll have the time to either update the look and feel of the blog or at least update to the latest version of the theme.
But until then, feel free to point out when that’s happening. I read comments through my e-mail alerts normally, so when the comments go all wonky I don’t know unless someone tells me.
And yes, tags do work in the comment here. But people shouldn’t feel bad about not using them because it is a bug.
This happens to me more often on Chrome Android – though that’s probably at least partially because the screen width is smaller.