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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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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.
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.