Hauling myself out of my migraine hell to say that the statistics of Mother Jones are criticizable but not dismissible. Clean data on stuff like this is nearly impossible to get, but that doesn’t mean that you just throw your hands up, it means you find ways to work with the data you’ve got.

News reports are a perfectly valid way of getting data of this kind; you can reasonably assume that mass shootings aren’t going to go unreported. The danger is double-counting them, but any real human attention to the data will fix that problem. Edit: This is actually more of a problem with the data that includes home shootings, because those will be reported on less often and more inconsistently than public shootings will.

But mostly, the Mother Jones fixes a problem with past data, which was the conflation of the ‘murder your whole family’ kind of murderers with ‘shoot up the theater’ murderers. Criticize the MJ data if you want, Hal, but apply that same eye to the other data, it has similar problems because the data is really hard to work with and any investigation is going to require creativity. Mother Jones does well in showing their methodology, thus allowing honest criticism, so you should treat them respectfully.

Finally, I agree with Rightwingconspirator that distinguishing between the two types of shootings may not be relevant to gun control. Convincing people that having guns in the home is a foolish, dangerous risk, wildly statistically probably unnecessary for ‘home defense’ for the vast majority of people who get them for that reason, would probably do more to curb gun deaths than stopping public shootings.

However, in terms of how we know actual human beings react, that kind of doesn’t matter. As someone else said, you can hope to in some way take caution to prevent yourself being shot with your own guns: I.e. sensibly not owning any. The random shooter is scary, in the same way terrorism was. Losing 3000 people on 9/11 shook us to our very core, despite the fact that that is a negligible part of our population and we lose far, far more people to inadequate health care every year. I like educating people about how small the risks of dying from terrorism, or public gun violence, actually are, but I’m not foolish enough to think we’re going to reach the vast majority. Hell, one of the main reasons we have such high gun ownership in this country are the millions of people who think that crime is far, far higher than it actually is, despite decades of reports about crime falling.

I’m going to go throw up my spine now.