Different organizations classify "mass shooting" in different ways. Some say three or more, others four or more, some count a dead shooter as a casualty and others don't, some discount domestic situations and others link shootings in multiple places as one "rampage" event. Yet others differentiate between a "mass shooting" and a "mass killing," or lump them together. The result is that people of each ideology will pick and choose a study that best supports their case, so each side also gets used to discounting whole studies as biased because the other "side" used them, meaning that even when there *is* a conclusion, exhaustive study with solid conclusions, one side or the other throws them on the same pile as the biased, flimsy crap.
The best I can offer is this: The damage these public shootings do to society is far more than can be reflected by a simple body count, in the same way that one cannot discount the Boston Marathon bombing as no big deal because "only" three people died. They are terror by definition; the point is beyond just the killings themselves, but to use their deaths to inflict damage on our whole way of life. I can't imagine anyone looking at our nation now and not noticing that, for whatever reason, these are happening a lot, lot more often than they used to, at at some point we need to try SOMETHING to either keep these people from becoming the way they are, or at least removing their ability to put their twisted thoughts into actions.
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