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U.S. school shootings hit another annual record high
(www.axios.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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This is depressing, but it also bothers me that there's such a large distinction between how the average person would picture a "school shooting" and what these articles are talking about. Is there a name for that in journalism?
Like, if someone told me "there was a school shooting at school X today", like most people I would immediately picture someone walking into the building and firing indiscriminately at everyone. Not, "a couple of teens got in a fight in the parking lot, and one pulled out a gun", or "someone shot at the school's sign". (Which are also horrible, but I feel like we need separate terms)
From the article:
According to the report, the most commonly known situations associated with such incidents included "escalation of dispute," "drive-by," "illegal activity," "accidental firing of a weapon" and "intentional property damage."
As a parent, the distinction means very little to me. They all have the same premise: somebody brought a gun to school. That just doesn’t happen elsewhere outside the US aside from edge cases like tiny rural towns where they legitimately need to look out for wild animals.
It's horrible, don't get me wrong. I worry about my own little one, but the distinction is an order of magnitude of a difference in my head. Like the distinction between a troublemaker throwing a lit match in a trash can vs some maniac dousing a building in gasoline.
I guess for me, all I can think is “who cares if the ultimate result is the building burning down?” Not critiquing you don’t worry. Just providing a different perspective.
If guns go off at my kids’ school, guns went off. The backstory means very little to toddlers.
To me, that’s like the people who complain that gang-related shootings count as gun crimes. Not everything has to be Columbine/Las Vegas/Sandy Hook/Virginia Tech… (too many to list, honestly too many to keep track of, and I read the news daily. They’re all symptoms of the gun problem in the US. A lot of fun crimes are done by criminals? What a shock! But they have drug dealers and gang members in other countries, and we don’t see the levels of gun violence we do in the US. America is literally off the charts when they do international studies.
A shooting at a school is a shooting at a school, period. I can’t think of anyone who would defend calling it anything else. It doesn’t matter if it’s two kids fighting over who gets to sell drugs or just someone who doesn’t like Mondays.
It's already a sad state of affairs that you hear the phrase "school shooting" that your mind goes to the Columbine style shooting. That the concept has happened enough that people have a mental model for it.
I hear your desire to better classifications, but as the other reply noted to a parent, even someone shooting at a stop-sign is a red flag. None of that should be happening with any regularity. The fact that kids are carrying around guns and can even have them on school property is enough for parents to want something done to ensure their children are safe. It's enough for parents with money, to leave an area for fear of losing their children.
None of it should be happening is right. I just get a skeezy feeling when articles use language they know will get people thinking one thing when they mean another.
Sure, but you shared the clarification the journalist used, so they've actually spelled out that it's not just school massacres in the article. It also doesn't necessarily imply the core title isn't true.
The more you read, the more you start to realize there are never clear definitions for anything. You always have to look for the author to clearly define what they're talking about.
Why do we need such a distinction? These are shootings at schools. They are school shootings.
Because a columbine type of school shooting is different than property damage.
And people writing these articles know that "some destructive teens did donuts in the school parking lot at night and shot the stop sign" isn't what people think when they say that a "school shooting" has happened.
If they kill a Columbine -1, is that a school shooting? What if they try to massacre people but there are no fatalities, is that a school shooting? The attempt to make "school shooting" fit only the worst case scenario means we ignore a problem until it has had its absolute worst outcome.
Is it a school shooting if it's two people in a parking lot at midnight on a Tuesday that are selling drugs? I would say no. Calling it a school shooting implies that the school/children are targeted specifically. Being dishonest about the facts backfires basically every time, as it shows you aren't acting in good faith.
Axios didn’t make the term up, the National Center for Educational Statistics did.
Your premise seems to be that these are mostly no big deal and the term school shooting is being used deliberately to conjure images of Columbine. It’s not clear how you reached that conclusion when the number of casualties of school shootings has nearly doubled year over year, per the article.