The Trace Mangles Definition Of 'Mass Shooting' To Include Texas Shooting

Over the weekend, a shooting at a homecoming party at a Texas A&M satellite campus marred what should have been a good time for college students. Two people were killed and a dozen others injured.

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What happened was a tragedy by any measure you might want to use. After all, two people are dead who shouldn’t be. It’s a tragedy.

However, another tragedy is how The Trace is mangling the definition of mass shooting in order to include this latest incident.

Texas’s latest mass shooting strikes a college community. Police say someone opened fire with a handgun late Saturday at event space in the town of Greenville, 50 miles northeast of Dallas, killing two people and leaving six others with bullet wounds. Approximately 750 people, most of them in their teens or early 20s, were at the party, with some turning out to celebrate homecoming weekend at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Six additional victims were injured in the chaos. Gunfire erupted again at a vigil for one of the victims. No one was struck, but several vehicles were found with bullet holes, including one belonging to a local news crewThe perpetrator remains unknown. Police say they are frustrated that witnesses have not offered more detail on the shooter, who may have been targeting a specific victim.

(Bolding in original)

Now, only two people were killed. How is this a mass shooting? After all, the FBI categorizes “mass murder” as four or more people killed in a single event. A mass shooting would simply be a subset of that category, right?

Well, what did local law enforcement have to say?

When asked whether the shooting was a mass shooting, Meeks said he would not classify it that way.

“I would describe this as a capital murder case, I wouldn’t describe it as a mass shooting. We believe one person was targeted and for some unknown reason to us he decided to go ahead and shoot other folks,” Meeks said. “I wouldn’t classify that as a mass shooting.”

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Fascinating, isn’t it?

Of course, it seems that The Trace is using a favorite definition of “mass shooting” among the gun-grabber sect that defines it as an incident when four or more people are shot, rather than killed. This opens up to any number of incidents that don’t fit the image the American public has of a mass shooting by any stretch of the imagination. I think The Trace knows this, of course, and opts to use this so they can claim a much larger number of mass shootings in the United States and panic people into thinking it’s a bigger problem than it is.

What transpired in Texas over the weekend wasn’t a mass shooting. It was an awful tragedy and a terrible event that I’m sure traumatized everyone there to some degree, but to call it a mass shooting is to downplay the horrible events of Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, El Paso, Dayton, and Odessa, just to name a few.

The problem is that if it’s not a mass shooting, it’s so much harder to politicize it, and that’s The Trace‘s reason for existing, isn’t it?

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