naraburns nihil supernum
1yr 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.
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 -
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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