While I was going to school today the mention of a shooting happening in Texas with a Lawyer and then a school shooting in South Carolina sparked a question that seemed to just… hit a nerve. How many people seem to instantly think something is mass shooting if something happens. Two girls I interviewed about this topic came back very interesting.

        Linnea (Senior) had this to say “Using social media, I thought South Carolina was a mass shooting.” Without knowing everything about it the words “Mass” popped into many people’s heads as if it would be natural to think that. With all the shooting that happen nowadays, People turn to these words of mass shooting to automatically scapegoat the situation and focus on either banning guns or more racism. Although when people are told the information about the shootings Ana (Senior) said that “I wouldn’t say that’s a mass shooting, just a shooting”. The difference between the information and how a situation is rationalized is huge.

        I feel that every time a shooting happens, everyone thinks it’s a mass shooting and that guns should be banned because of it. True fully the guns aren’t causing the mass shootings, it’s the people behind them. Same thing with how people perceive this. It’s the person’s fault for automatically thinking its mass, how everyone sees society as a whole when something happens is to think the worse of themselves. In doing so I would think that most people don’t know the difference. Not many are informed or in the know about it and it’s troubling because the fast and big things people push for. Mass shooting means one thing, a person take a gun and decided to take the lives of others. As Linnea puts it “A mass shooting is when someone takes a gun and goes to a public area and opens fire to see how many people they can hit.” This definition isn’t wrong but it does go between how many and is there intent. The blurred lines between plain shooting or mass shooting are so grey that most don’t know how to clarify it; but it’s just grey enough that people can see it. I feel that many choose not to see the line and jump to mass shooting.