[cliff_hanger]

It's not clear to me why this study would set those thresholds for the underlying data (4+ Victims & 2+ deaths), this seems to downplay the number of incidents. At the very least there should be some explanation of why this limit is in place, as it has a significant impact on the findings.

Closest thing I can find to an accurate data-set is here: https://www.kaggle.com/ecodan/us-school-shootings-dataset/no.... Data seems to be a blend of a northwestern study and the wikipedia list of shootings.

[xg15]

Absolutely. Even if there is some research question by which this criterion would be useful, it doesn't lead the underlying conclusions that school shootings in general are a rare event, declining in frequency.

Interestingly, according to [1], the criterion used by the FBI to assess mass shooting used to be "at least 4 persons killed or wounded" - until it got changed to "at least 3 persons" in 2013. So the criterion the study uses is stricter than both the old and the new way of counting the FBI uses.

Note also that, according to [2], even though the rate of mass shooting at schools seems to be decreasing, the rate of mass shootings in general is increasing.

See also [3] for more information about the different definitions and ways of counting.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting

[2] https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-study-200...

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/02/anothe...