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Interesting article about mass shootings and contagion.

[npr.org]

Pamscwf1 7 Aug 7
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Here is the problem I have with most "information" that is released. It is released by people with agendas and those wishing to inflame or needing ratings...like most of mainstream media. I spent several days last year after many of my friends were passing around a piece of trash claiming there were 17 (or 18 depending on the news agency) school shootings just months into the new year. A group called Everytown was infuriating people with lies of just how many school shootings there were. Here is an actual breakdown, from last years idiocy, showing just how many school shootings had occurred since the beginning of the year. Again, this is an example of LAST YEARS idiocy. I point it out because the same thing is happening now and it drives me nuts.

Most of us, myself included, hear school shooting and think Columbine (or similar). However, the term “school shooting” is also broad in definition; it also applies to a shooting near a school (Grade, High, or College level) and doesn’t differentiate if the school was closed or not and no students present. A list was generated, by an anti-gun advocacy group called Everytown For Gun Safety, who used this muddy description of school shootings to inflame people. Only one of these school shootings used an AR-15 type rifle, the other two were handguns. Here is a list of those 18 “school shootings” and their descriptions:

2018 U.S. school shootings as counted by Everytown

Date Place Details
Jan. 3 East Olive Elementary, St. Johns, Mich. Man committed suicide in parking lot. No other injuries.
(We found the building was not being used as a school, as East Olive had been shut down more than six months earlier.)
Jan. 4 New Start High, Seattle Unidentified shooter fired shots into building. No injuries.
Jan. 10 Grayson College, Denison, Texas Student unintentionally fired a bullet from gun legally possessed by an instructor that struck a wall. No injuries.
Jan. 10 Coronado Elementary, Sierra Vista, Ariz. Student committed suicide in bathroom. No other injuries.
Jan. 10 California State University, San Bernardino Gunshots, most likely fired from off campus, hit a campus building window. No injuries.
Jan. 15 Wiley College, Marshall, Texas Shots fired from car in parking lot, with one shot hitting window of residence hall. No injuries.
Jan. 20 Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C. One student wounds another student during argument at sorority party.
Jan. 22 Italy High, Italy, Texas Student opens fire in cafeteria, wounding one student before firing at another student and missing. Gun used was a .380 handgun. (dallasnews.com)
Jan. 22 NET Charter High, Gentilly, La. Unknown person fired shots at students standing in parking lot. No injuries from gunshots.
Jan. 23 Marshall County High, Benton, Ky. 2 students left dead in mass shooting by student. More than a dozen students injured. Gun used was a hand gun – no model given, (nypost.com)
Jan. 25 Murphy High, Mobile, Ala. Student fired into the air outside school after argument in school. No injuries.
Jan. 26 Dearborn High, Dearborn, Mich. Individual ejected from game for fighting was shot at in parking lot. No injuries.
Jan. 31 Lincoln High, Philadelphia Man fatally wounded in fight in parking lot.
Feb. 1 Salvador B. Castro Middle, Los Angeles Student unintentionally fires gun in classroom, wounds two students.
Feb. 5 Oxon Hill High, Oxon Hill, Md. Student wounded in parking lot during apparent robbery.
Feb. 5 Harmony Learning K-12, Maplewood, Minn. Student pressed trigger on school liaison officer’s gun. No injuries.
Feb. 8 Metropolitan High, New York, N.Y. Student fired gun into floor in classroom. No injuries.
Feb. 14 Stoneman Douglas High, Parkland, Fla. Ex-student allegedly commits mass shooting; 17 deaths.
Gun used was an AR-15 rifle.

So, there are 18 incidents in which a gun was fired inside a school or on a former or current school property.
Three -- Italy, Texas, Kentucky and Florida -- were mass shootings.
But of the other shootings:
• Nine involved no deaths and no gunshot injuries.
• Two were suicides, with no other injuries (including the one at the closed school).
• Three were unintentional (although one caused injuries).
• One was an apparent robbery in progress.

I'm confused by your response. Did you read the article? The data that was used was from 2014 and 15. They were trying to see if mass killings could be contagious.

@Pamscwf1 I did read the article. My reason for posting this was because just like last years "misinformation" articles. This article, to me, wreaks of the same kind of "misinformation". Since mass shootings are labeled differently depending on state and local governments' varying definitions making it nearly impossible to come up with a high percentage of accuracy. That along with just how shootings in general are categorized. If you use just the largely publicized ones and only along the course of a decade, or so, you will come up with something that may look like a contagion correlation but is really just coincidence and not based on all the facts. It mentioned that these shootings seem to happen in clusters? Well, define a cluster...Are we looking at several days apart, weeks apart, months apart? What is the allowable time between these incidents to infer a causality between the shootings and them being a contagion. If the study is conducted over only about 15 years it would not give a clear picture.To get a real picture you have to take into account all mental health, blatant anger (you know where the phrase "going postal" came from), anti-social personality disorders, hate and racism/bigotry, etc. It feels like the comment is made that if you are suicidal, that you are predisposed or like-minded to committing "mass" shootings/killings. The study also mentions "school shootings". Well, are you including ALL school shootings as similarly outlined in my post or actual shooters, in a school, with a weapon, actively killing other students/teachers? This makes a huge difference. This is what kind of stuns me because as a leading researcher of infectious diseases she would know that you have to follow a disease back to it's roots as much as humanly possible - the history AND epidemiology both. This history goes back much longer than a decade and a half. The study seems really lacking and can paint a bad picture for many who don't research these things...and I'm sure you see people regurgitaing unfounded facts all the time - especially on social media.
The information I posted was similar in that it shows how readers can be misinformed or swayed by using their own inferences without researching. The school shooting totals were accurate - if you take into account the different definitions of them but if you look at each one, they don't equate to a shooting where a person goes in and blasts people in a school. The very thing everyone is afraid of.

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"What we found was that for the mass killings — so these are high-profile mass killings where there's at least four people killed — there was significant evidence of contagion," says Towers. "We also found significant evidence of contagion in the school shootings."

In other words, school shootings and other shootings with four or more deaths spread like a contagion — each shooting tends to spark more shootings.

Kind of logical....not surprising at all....

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Very interesting & thought provoking article. Thanks for posting.

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