Mother Jones's Own Reporting Contradicts Its Conclusions on Gun Violence

Yesterday, I criticized a dubious report that Mother Jones did on gun violence. You can read the Mother Jones article here, but at issue was Mother Jones’s bold conclusion:

In the wake of the slaughters this summer at a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we set out to track mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 62 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun.

For the purposes of their study, they identified mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people were killed. Right off the bat, this suggests their conclusion is somewhat fallacious. The whole point is that the presence of other armed people on the scene might stop mass shootings from becoming mass shootings. Anyway, I cited a random sampling of examples where exactly that happened. A number of those incidents involved off-duty cops and I acknowledged this explicitly, while making the distinction that Mother Jones’s definition of “civilian” seems odd and slippery: