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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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These are not "traditional mass shootings style school shootings" and Cristo Rey High School is more gang bangers being gang bangers.

Location Deaths Injuries Details
Evergreen High School 1 2 Shooter (suicide); two students critically wounded but survived.
Antioch High School 2 1 Includes the shooter (suicide) and one 16-year-old female victim.
Florida State University 1 3 Shooter killed by police; three victims wounded (one paralyzed).
Lincoln University 1 6 One fatality during Homecoming; multiple gunshot and stampede injuries.

These are not "traditional mass shootings style school shootings"

How are they not? These don't seem to be "gang member just shoots another gang member" shootings, they include multiple victims and motivations outside of gang affailation. Evergreen, Antioch and FSU seem to have been motivated by neonazism (Ikner of FSU even used a Hitler profile picture and called his gaming account Schutzstaffel), not gang violence.

Lincoln University shooting is barely covered in the news, it was basically just dropped right away. Which really is just another piece of evidence towards society not really caring about mass shootings that we don't even have followup on a 7 person attack.

How are they not?

For one thing, certain bodies (among them Mother Jones) define a "mass shooting" as one in which at least three fatalities are incurred.

Ok well I think that's a ridiculous definition as I already explained. The idea that distance to a hospital or a shooters aiming skill makes a meaningful difference seems laughable.

"makes a meaningful difference" to what?

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.