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At risk of stating the completely obvious, I think anti-woke / dissident rightist / based / race-fatigued white people would prefer that definitions clearly delineate gang/ghetto violence - which is mainly black-on-black / Hispanic-on-Hispanic, is heavily concentrated in a geographic sense, usually involves criminal or criminal-adjacent elements on both ends, often involves shootings with three or more victims, and is totally ignored by normie society in general - from "mass shootings" in the everyday normie sense of the word, to which none of these attributes apply.
I agree, all of the terms used in this debate have far too many degrees of freedom. You'll see a headline like "there have been 100 mass shootings in the US this year!" and then you dig into their data and you find that they're including gang violence, or four morons messing around with guns and accidentally shooting each other non-fatally. Or a headline like "50 school shootings this year" will include a drive-by shooting in which no students or school employees were shot, but which incidentally happened to take place within a 250-yard radius of a school and so technically qualifies as a shooting "in or near a school".
The people writing these headlines know full well that, when they say "mass shooting", everyone thinks of Pulse nightclub or Stephen Paddock; they know that when they say "school shooting", everyone thinks of Columbine or Virginia Tech. We need a specific term of art for these kinds of events (in which a lone wolf nutter seeking personal infamy shoots up a location more or less indiscriminately) which excludes gang violence and accidental discharges. For awhile it seemed that "active shooter" was going to become the preferred term, although this one strikes me as even more vague than "mass shooting": anyone who is currently firing their gun could be accurately described as an "active shooter", regardless of whether they're Eric Harris or a gangbanger.
The term "active shooter" would imply the existence of "passive shooters", which is just dumb. I think we can simply call them spree killers.
Artist's representation of a passive shooter.
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There was a push for about 2 days to use "violent nihilistic extremists," which is better but still not specific enough and rather unwieldy.
And it has an obvious limitation for the small subset of "active shooters" who are ideologically motivated (Brenton Tarrant, Omar Mateen, Anders Behring Breivik). As loathsome as these men were, at least they had an ethos.
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