—Terrence Dorner, B1Daily

America has a gun violence problem, but it also has a serious problem with how gun violence is classified, reported, and presented to the public. When a gang-related shooting leaves four people wounded, headlines may immediately identify it as a mass shooting. When an individual opens fire indiscriminately inside a school, that incident may receive the exact same classification.

But are these really the same type of crime?

The distinction matters because the circumstances, motives, victims, and potential solutions can differ dramatically. Yet some mainstream media reporting presents mass shooting statistics without adequately explaining what those numbers actually include.

The result is a public conversation in which fundamentally different forms of violence can become statistically indistinguishable.

The Definition Problem Nobody Wants to Discuss

The Gun Violence Archive, frequently cited in national reporting, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot, excluding the shooter. Under that standard, a shooting connected to gang activity can qualify even if nobody dies.

That is not necessarily a statistical error. It is a deliberately broad definition. The problem arises when news organizations fail to explain it to audiences who may associate the term with indiscriminate attacks at schools, shopping centers, and public gatherings.

Consider the difference between a targeted gang dispute that wounds four individuals and a gunman deliberately attacking strangers inside a supermarket. Both involve multiple victims, but their circumstances and the prevention strategies they require may be substantially different.

The Congressional Research Service has documented numerous competing definitions of mass shootings, including narrower categories that exclude gang violence, robberies, and other criminal disputes.

Different Crimes Require Different Solutions

Gang-related shootings often involve retaliation, territorial disputes, drug markets, or interpersonal conflicts. Public mass attacks may involve entirely different motives and patterns of preparation.

Combining these incidents into one headline statistic without identifying their circumstances can obscure the underlying problems.

A strategy designed to interrupt retaliatory gang violence may involve focused deterrence, witness protection, community intervention, and investigations into criminal networks. Preventing indiscriminate attacks may require different approaches involving threat assessment, security, and identifying warning signs.

Researchers also make a legitimate counterargument: excluding gang-related shootings from mass shooting statistics risks minimizing the suffering of innocent bystanders and survivors. Four people wounded in a gang-related attack are no less deserving of public attention than four people wounded elsewhere.

The answer, however, should not be to erase distinctions. It should be to report them accurately.

Journalism Should Inform, Not Confuse

Mainstream news organizations have a responsibility to tell audiences precisely what their statistics measure. A headline announcing hundreds of mass shootings can be technically consistent with a particular database while still leaving readers with a misleading understanding of the incidents being counted.

That does not mean gang-related violence should be ignored or excluded from every national statistic. It means reporters should distinguish between gang-related multiple-victim shootings, domestic mass killings, and indiscriminate public attacks whenever reliable evidence permits.

The public deserves more than an alarming number stripped of its context.

America cannot fully understand its gun violence crisis when fundamentally different crimes are presented as though they are interchangeable.

Accurate reporting does not diminish victims. It gives the public a clearer understanding of what happened, why it happened, and which policies might prevent it from happening again.

—Terrence Dorner, B1Daily