‘School shooting’ definition has recently been changed to make it look like they are more frequent now

"Interesting. The definition of 'school shooting' was changed to make them seem common, when in fact it’s rarer than we realized," tweeted filmmaker Mike Cernovich on Thursday:

May 26, 2022

This article by Reason breaks it down: The root of the problem is "that three very differently defined terms are being used somewhat incautiously and interchangeably: 'school shooting,' 'mass shooting,' and 'mass school shooting.'"

"Uvalde was a mass school shooting; the 26 previous tragedies at schools this year were not," Reason continues to report, continuing with the definition that at least three people have to be killed (in most cases, four) in order for an incident to officially be considered a mass shooting, according to the Gun Violence Archive itself.

Using this metric, there have only been a total 13 mass school shootings since 1966, going back to the infamous clock tower incident at the University of Austin on Aug 1 of that year.

Without minimizing the gravity of any incident of this nature, it's worth noting that, once again as Reason goes on to report, "mass casualty events, on the other hand, constitute less than 1 percent of all gun deaths, and that "suicides and non–mass-casualty murders—usually carried out with handguns rather than assault rifles—constitute the overwhelming majority of gun crimes."