I think of ‘mass’ in the context of defining groups of things as just ‘a lot under the circumstances’. A mass gathering for an NFL game is 100,000 people; a mass crowd for a high-school JV basketball game is probably 100; a mass crowd for a 1 year old’s birthday is maybe 50. It’s relative to what is expected under normal circumstances. 4 people being shot or injured is a lot because nobody should be shot or injured.
this is again loaded language. the intent is to make things seem more severe than they were. the bombing of Nagasaki was a mass killing, shooting 4 people is a shooting with 4 victims, not a mass shooting.
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.
it’s your tone and an assumption that i don’t understand the definition of context. it is hateful disagreements like this that radicalize people. your response was hateful, reword it without defining words for people.
It's not hateful at all. I wish you no ill will whatsoever.
I'm just calling out what seems pretty clearly to be your lack of nuance/flexibility of the language. Which is something you might expect from a recent English language learner or a child.
Are you one of those? If not, you're pretty clearly being deliberately obtuse.
I won't hazard a guess as to why you might do such a thing, as that would likely be uncharitable.
I'll sum up, in case you're still confused: Calling you out for your tone deafness and/or deliberate obtuseness isn't hateful at all.
In fact, it's meant to inform you of the above as a service, so that you might provide higher quality discourse here.
As for being "hateful," I have no quarrel with you. I wish no harm on you, nor have you earned my ire. Rather, I have no strong feelings about you one way or the other.
If a mild remonstration is considered to be "hateful" by you, I can hardly imagine your reaction to actual verbal abuse. I expect it wouldn't be pretty.
it’s simple, don’t use verbiage meant to manipulate emotions. so just call it a shooting. the qualifier mass serves no purpose and changes nothing about how the case is prosecuted. the suspect is still charged with individual murder or manslaughter charges, not one single charge of multiple deaths.
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.
