What counts as a “mass shooting”? The definition varies

Here in Columbus, Ohio on Saturday morning, by all accounts, one would think that there was a mass shooting: two were killed and four others were injured after the shooting.

With six being shot and for over 24 hours no media outlet calling it a mass shooting, that led me to ask the question. What categories or defines a mass shooting?

The United States Congress defined "mass shootings" as three or more homicides in a single incident. The definition was intended to clarify when the U.S. Attorney General could assist state and local authorities in investigations of violent acts and shootings in places of public use.

By their definition, the shooting this past weekend wouldn’t qualify as a mass shooting. But, the phrase along is defined differently by a variety of organizations depending on who you ask.

A stricter definition was in a 2015 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service that defined "mass public shooting" as a multiple-homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms in at least one or more public locations, including schools.

Over the weekend, I reached out to multiple sources within The Columbus Division of Police and they told me that local law enforcement agencies don’t have a clear-cut definition of what a "mass shooting" is. I’m told that the main reason is that once someone is killed it is investigated as “a homicide” and when someone is shot it’s investigated as “a felonious assault.”

Considering that explanation from my sources and the other definitions above the term mass shooting is only used by the media as a descriptive term to refer to the shooting of multiple people that has just taken place.

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