Wikipedia has an extra page on that, which I took as the basis of my comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting#Definitions

To quote: " The term was originally defined as the murder of four or more people with no cooling-off period[1][5] but redefined by Congress in 2013 as being murder of three or more people."

Not only that, at the risk of repeating myself, the page you criticize as being "disingenuous" clearly mentions that definitions of "mass shootings" are controversial and provides 5 alternative definitions in the second paragraph of the article and then lists 7 data sources with definitions of "mass shooting" that either coincides with the one by US Congress or is more stringent (based on the pre 2013 definition).

The page also clearly states that "... only incidents considered mass shootings by at least two of the above sources are listed."

There is absolutely nothing disingenuous about this method.

What you and the people who downvote me cannot get into their minds is that there are official definitions that are used in statistics and that the listing on the Wikipedia page takes a slighly more stringent and narrower definition as a basis to safeguard against criticisms such as yours.

Again, you are of course free to re-define the term "mass shooting" differently from what e.g. the US Congress or Stanford University do, but this would not constitute a valid criticism of the list. How could it? Merely prefering your very personal definition over another one doesn't mean anything, especially if it deviates far from the official use of the term.

The term that you're quoting the US Congress definition of is "mass killing".

If someone commits a mass killing with a gun, then it becomes a mass shooting.

Frankly speaking, it's not clear what this thread is about. According to social constructivism, social reality might change by re-defining terms like "mass shooting", but according to my sense of reality the number of victims doesn't change at all. I can also see no reason why Wikipedia shouldn't base their lists on the 'most official' terms rather than making up their own, as long as they make clear that this includes multiple homicides by gun, which they do.

> If someone commits a mass killing with a gun, then it becomes a mass shooting.

Yes. This sub-thread started with someone else arguing that one of the entries on the list of "mass shootings" did not deserve to be on the list.

If the argument is "it must involve deaths to be a mass shooting", that incident also involved zero deaths (and zero innocent civilian injuries).

Wait, I was wrong. The definitions clearly differentiate between number of people shot and number of people killed, and the Wikipedia article is explicit about the sources used and the definitions used by the sources.

There is nothing wrong with the list, but there seems to be some metalinguistic dispute about what's the best definition of "mass shooting."

This dispute is merely about words.

While most forum disputes are about words, I think that @frittig makes a valid point in questioning whether the lawful shooting of active criminal home invaders ought to be considered a "mass shooting" just because there happened to be a lot of home invaders. So, yes it's about words in part, but also about concepts.

For my part, all else being equal, for every N criminal home invaders, the optimal number of home invaders repelled by lawful force without injury to innocent civilians is also exactly N. If you want to mix those relatively rare good mass shootings in with other bad mass shootings (the vast majority of them), that's one way to approach things. You could also keep a list of "Things that happened on Tuesdays in history" and it would be a perfectly self-consistent list.

You are apparently looking at this from the perspective of the victims only, but the burglars were also armed and shooting. They have been arrested for it: "... charges including first-degree burglary, conspiracy, shooting with intent to kill and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony" [Oklahoma News 4, emphasis mine]

> good mass shootings in with other bad mass shootings

I'd certainly say that's better methodology than trying to define "good" and "bad" mass shootings and then only list the "bad" ones. (I don't quite see what's good about this shooting anyway, but I suppose you mean that the crime was stopped.)

That's exactly what I mean. No injuries to innocents; dangerous crime (armed home invasion) thwarted.