I mean... important by what metric?

Active shootings in the US kill like 100 people a year (as of 2024 I guess: https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/reports-and-publications...)

Suicides is more like 50,000/yr

Yeah when you redefine the term to be "active shooter" I guess, something tells me that the American public still doesn't want to die in a mass shooting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

It's a sick society when you have one for nearly every single day of the year. But hey this is the result of neoliberal economics so why should we get too upset at the societal rot when corporatists are increasing shareholder value?

Ok sure, mass shooting (400) vs active shooting (100). It is still the same order of magnitude, and two orders of magnitude off of suicides (50,000).

I'm not sure how that changes the point I was making, which is that suicides don't seem obviously less important.

The terminology was specifically to counter the slight of hand you just did.

Over time the definition of "mass shooting" kept getting watered down to include a lot of "normal criminals with normal criminal goals they are trying to further by killing" shootings by people who wanted the number to be bigger to mislead the public into thinking indiscriminately targeted, killing for the sake of killing type shootings perpetrated by people who are mentally ill are much more common than they are in order to push various policies.

So then the people concerned with studying the latter had to come up with a new term that only encompassed people going off the deep end and did not include normal crime hence "active shooting"

That account has a -10 karma. It is just a gibberish bot.

They are, depending on your definition of 'mass':

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47866222

The number of people lost is much higher than from shootings, I'm pretty sure.

You are engaging with a bot with -13 karma:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mondomondo