Why are you so intent on the definition of "mass?" whether "mass" means 4 or 400, one "mass shooting" is one too many. Arguing about how many people are allowed to die in an incident before we do something about it does nothing to prevent this from happening.

Hateful?

Really? Providing definitions of words that seem not to be in one's vocabulary is hateful?

Let's see:

hateful[0] (adjective) 1 : full of hate : malicious 2 : deserving of or arousing hate

Defining words arouses hate?

Should I warn the fine folks over at Merriam Webster that you might come for them?

Or is it that you think suggesting that context is an important part of understanding language is a hateful endeavour?

Please, do tell. This is fascinating!

I wish you well and hope there are folks who will welcome you and make you feel loved. Is that more hateful stuff too, friend?

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hateful

I'll do one further. I don't care if the verbiage is "manipulative" or has a spin to it so long as the term and definition are not specifically crafted to overload plain english terms to facilitate being misleading with plausible deniability.

That's how low of a bar I'll set and they still can't meet it.

You seem to be under the impression that other countries experience even a fraction of the violence Americans experience from guns.

We don't. What's happening in America with the gun violence is uniquely horrifying.

You're gonna have to explain your point better. No one said mental illness doesn't exist. Your comment has nothing to do with the definition of mass shootings. No one defines mass shooting as "a mentally ill person who shoots people." It's pretty much given that a mass shooter is mentally ill. The point of contention is what does "mass" mean.

>Are you sure about that? There are probably some differences in prevention and response, but also plenty of similarities too. Like better mental healthcare, outlawing private gun ownership, and teaching non-violent conflict resolution.

Targeting the overlap (mental health, guns, etc) is stupid and inefficient unless your goal is to take some action that can be done under that pretext and you don't really care about resource expenditure toward results. There's only so much political capital and surplus wealth round to be directed toward such ends. Something like gun control is massively political expensive. There's cheaper ways to get the same result.

I think the suggestion of addressing non-violent conflict resolution is a great example of that sort of "well I want to do a thing and this is my justification" because while it would certainly address the "traditional crime" end it's perhaps a generally good thing to do but it's not going to affect the mass shootings much because those people typically have little to no conflict with who they're shooting.

>So you're advocating for violence in response to speech?

Yes, and just to be clear I'm also advocating for all sorts of marginalization under the law short of violence leading up to that. Like all matters of law and social norms such marginalization is necessarily backed in violence though perhaps circuitously. The way I see it speech makes us all fractionally responsible for the results of what our words endorse. If society is willing to pay a bunch of cops to levy violence upon people over fairly petty misdeeds then I think it's at least arguably justifiable to direct the same kinds of violence at people who's speech greatly furthers tings and riles up people toward ends that are huge negatives. Politicians, news people, internet personalities ought not to be able to rile people up and then wash their hands of it saying that they were not there when the bricks got thrown or people to get shot.

I'm also aware that this is bad for freedom and human rights but that ship sailed so long ago. If we're going to have prolific law enforcement and subject as many things as we do to it, allegedly for the betterment of society, then screw it, lets' do speech too. If we're all gonna get stomped by the jackboot like this is singapore we might as well enjoy the upsides.