can you tell me why it is important to specify up front whether it was all a single shooting incident?
Because multiple/many instances of gang violence, domestic violence, robbery, et al. in a highly populated area are separate issues than someone purposefully shooting into a crowded concert from a nearby hotel room window or else running down scores of people on the sidewalk with a truck.
If the topic is gun control, aren’t any of these shootings equally relevant to whether we bolster background checks, limit who can have guns, or ban guns altogether?
You say they are separate issues, which I take to mean not all necessarily about gun control. It’s a fair point if you think there are different kinds of solutions. I made the same point many pages ago responding to a post by Collipso. If you don’t want to click, Collipso said there, “Is it ever going to end?” with a copypasted link that included, “central-michigan-university-shots-fired.”
If you didn’t click on the link he gave, you might’ve jump to the conclusion there was a big mass shooting at a school. Nobody apparently jumped to that conclusion nor faulted Collipso for not making it clear that that wasn’t what happened. You could say he didn’t “edit” a headline but that’s a stylistic nitpick. The response back then was that it was about guns and the need to restrict them. The fact that it wasn’t a mass shooting was not mentioned by anyone other than me.
All that said, the violence in Chicago this past weekend was really bad even for Chicago. I’d be curious what different solutions people might think are warranted to address it than we see proposed for mass shootings.
The circumstances involved with, and the societal impact of, one person shooting sixty people versus sixty people shooting one person each, is significant enough to be relevant to the story. Omitting such information skews the response people will give, which is to say it leads people to become misinformed based on (understandably) inaccurate assumptions.
The societal/emotional impact and the journalistic hooks are different, I grant you. I do hope people click on the link and maybe express their views on the topic.