It’s no wonder that people are confused and concerned about mass shootings. After all, mass shootings are terrible things.
Just the idea that someone would show up, with no warning, and with the intent to kill as many innocent people as possible, especially people that they don’t know, is just awful.
And that’s generally how people tend to think of mass shootings: random (to everyone but the shooter) and looking for people that they don’t know in order to kill them.
You wouldn’t characterize a planned fight or a gang incident as a mass shooting because those aren’t random, and they know each other.
Yet, the media was recently busted for doing just that: calling a planned fight a mass shooting.
To be clear on the situation, let’s look at the details of the situation. From an news story from The Associated Press:
A planned fight among young people escalated into a mass shooting at a North Carolina park Monday morning that left two teenage boys dead and five other people injured, authorities said.
Winston-Salem police Capt. Kevin Burns said a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old died at the scene after being shot around 10 a.m. at Leinbach Park, near a middle school. Five others between the ages of 14 and 19 were shot and suffered injuries ranging from critical to minor, Burns said at a news conference. Four of those victims are female, officials said.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. This whole situation is tragic. These young people shouldn’t have died.
I’ll also say that these young people shouldn’t have been planning a fight with each other or pulling out guns on each other (which, I’ll point out, they couldn’t have legally had in that state due to their age).
To characterize this shooting on the same level as the Charleston church shooting or the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, outright deceptive for the purpose of scaring people and pushing gun control.
I’m inclined to think that it’s the latter. And it’s not just me that thinks so. Colion Noir does, too. You can see his take on this below.
Noir notes that street violence has different causes than mass shootings and that when you characterize them as the same, you decrease the chances of actually solving the problems because you aren’t addressing the underlying issues driving at least one, but possibly both, problems.
And the media’s intentional mischaracterization of one type of violence for another just makes it harder to solve either.