shot and killed fifteen people at their high school in Columbine, Colorado. National media dubbed the event a "school shooting." The term grimly expanded over the next several years to include similar events at army bases, movie theaters, churches, and nightclubs. Today, we commonly use the categories "mass shooter" and "mass shooting" to organize and classify information about gun violence. I will argue that neither category is an effective tool for reducing gun violence and use empirical data to show how these categories perpetuate a moral panic that harms already vulnerable demographics. I conclude that we should instead favor a narrower description of individuals and events, (e.g., "X shot Y people at Z") because we can talk about all of the relevant cases without contributing the undue harms.I will begin with two orienting remarks. Social categories are useful because they help us quickly classify and organize information. We create social categories by grouping individuals or objects together according to a descriptive and normative standard. The descriptive component identifies current members of the category, simultaneously giving us a way to predictively pick out future members. Descriptions can change over time in response to technological advancements or political pressure. Ian Hacking (1999) details how these developments can make the description more or less accurate and so evaluate how well a descriptive component identifies current or future members of a social category.The normative component of a social category explains why the identifying description matters. We can distinguish between normatively "thick" and "thin" social categories (Haslanger 2012). Thick social categories, like gender, race, or class, have a tremendous impact on our lives, whether we want them to or not. Thick social categories play a major role in the kinds of jobs (if any) we can have, the housing we have access to, or which political rights and resources we are American collective memory is because of how we experienced it: real-time and unedited media coverage conceptually transformed Columbine from a place into an event.Although Americans were transfixed by the violence and location, they were also disturbed by the shooters. As news footage aired, people began to fearfully wonder what made their schools different from Columbine and what made the students in their schools different from Harris and Klebold. The unnerving implication reveals a third racialized background premise about expected violence in schools: White teenagers were not expected to be violent and so there had to be a further reason why these two were aberrant (Leavy and Maloney 2009). 2 Shifting public attention to teenagers as new paradigmatic cases ushered in other predictive profiles. Warnings about teenagers who were goths, bullied, wore trench coats, listened to violent music, or played violent video games displaced prior concerns about loner middle-aged counterparts by listing new kinds of people to beware. 3 Columbine, then, further changed our co...
