naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
The first sentence of that link does: "A mass shooting is a violent crime in which an attacker kills or injures multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm."
The second sentence says, "There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting"".
We finally get past the part that agrees with me and the part that admits that reasonable people differ and reach, "Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare", but at this point it seems like an arbitrary rather than a principled exception. If someone wants to make up a term, and they pick "Adjective Noun" but then whine about "but I didn't really mean all instances of Noun that satisfied Adjective!", wouldn't it be better just to make up a new term? Logically it's more coherent. Rhetorically it doesn't allow you to steal all the connotations that Adjective+Noun already have, but that's a feature, not a bug.
(Also, I personally would have called the Wounded Knee Massacre a "war crime" rather than "warfare", wouldn't you? I know we're way before the Geneva conventions at that point, but "don't kill all the women and children too" seems like it's not too much of an anachronism to ask for.)
Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
That's a great argument for responding to different subcategories of mass shootings differently. It's not a good argument for caring about them differently ... and it's especially not an argument for excluding the deadliest of them, in the specific context of "which was deadliest"!
That doesn’t justify diluting the term.
The Wounded Knee Massacre is a dilution? Maybe at the time, when that sort of mass shooting got the murderers medals instead of prison, they'd have made that argument, but we should know better now. Nobody should ever look at the mass murder-via-shooting (am I at least allowed to call it that?) of hundreds of innocent people and say "gosh, these mass shootings aren't as bad as I thought!"
If you want to be pedantic, that first sentence doesn’t agree with you, because it specifies a singular attacker and firearm. Seeing as this would rule out central mass-shooting examples such as Columbine, Vegas, or the UT tower, I think it’s safe to say that first sentence is an incomplete definition!
Reasonable people differ. But most of them don’t appear to differ on whether a military or police action counts. Committing violence is literally their job. Responsibility is distributed. In theory, it’s even held accountable via nonviolent processes. The central examples of mass shootings are neither.
I’d have called Wounded Knee a Massacre. That’s a perfectly good term for umbrella of mass-murder-via-shooting. It wouldn’t apply to Gettysburg, of course, since more or less everyone involved there expected to shoot and be shot.
So yes, I’d call that a dilution of the term “mass shooting.” There were many perpetrators, not one. They caused the crime under the pretense of lawful actions. And, perhaps most important, they got away with it and returned to their normal lives, a characteristic which doesn’t tend to apply to homicidal individuals.
Coincidentally, Wikipedia agreed with me prior to last week. There’s at least one user who felt very strongly that “massacre” wasn’t enough, and that it was important for readers to associate the US Government with individual, malicious murderers. I think this was a strategic move rather than a truth-seeking one.
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Notes -
The first sentence of that link does: "A mass shooting is a violent crime in which an attacker kills or injures multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm."
The second sentence says, "There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting"".
We finally get past the part that agrees with me and the part that admits that reasonable people differ and reach, "Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare", but at this point it seems like an arbitrary rather than a principled exception. If someone wants to make up a term, and they pick "Adjective Noun" but then whine about "but I didn't really mean all instances of Noun that satisfied Adjective!", wouldn't it be better just to make up a new term? Logically it's more coherent. Rhetorically it doesn't allow you to steal all the connotations that Adjective+Noun already have, but that's a feature, not a bug.
(Also, I personally would have called the Wounded Knee Massacre a "war crime" rather than "warfare", wouldn't you? I know we're way before the Geneva conventions at that point, but "don't kill all the women and children too" seems like it's not too much of an anachronism to ask for.)
That's a great argument for responding to different subcategories of mass shootings differently. It's not a good argument for caring about them differently ... and it's especially not an argument for excluding the deadliest of them, in the specific context of "which was deadliest"!
The Wounded Knee Massacre is a dilution? Maybe at the time, when that sort of mass shooting got the murderers medals instead of prison, they'd have made that argument, but we should know better now. Nobody should ever look at the mass murder-via-shooting (am I at least allowed to call it that?) of hundreds of innocent people and say "gosh, these mass shootings aren't as bad as I thought!"
If you want to be pedantic, that first sentence doesn’t agree with you, because it specifies a singular attacker and firearm. Seeing as this would rule out central mass-shooting examples such as Columbine, Vegas, or the UT tower, I think it’s safe to say that first sentence is an incomplete definition!
Reasonable people differ. But most of them don’t appear to differ on whether a military or police action counts. Committing violence is literally their job. Responsibility is distributed. In theory, it’s even held accountable via nonviolent processes. The central examples of mass shootings are neither.
I’d have called Wounded Knee a Massacre. That’s a perfectly good term for umbrella of mass-murder-via-shooting. It wouldn’t apply to Gettysburg, of course, since more or less everyone involved there expected to shoot and be shot.
So yes, I’d call that a dilution of the term “mass shooting.” There were many perpetrators, not one. They caused the crime under the pretense of lawful actions. And, perhaps most important, they got away with it and returned to their normal lives, a characteristic which doesn’t tend to apply to homicidal individuals.
Coincidentally, Wikipedia agreed with me prior to last week. There’s at least one user who felt very strongly that “massacre” wasn’t enough, and that it was important for readers to associate the US Government with individual, malicious murderers. I think this was a strategic move rather than a truth-seeking one.
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