well to be honest, I assumed shootings were included in the category of gunfire homicides. Homicide is "the deliberate and unlawful killing of one person by another," so what are mass shootings if not mass homicides?

When people talk about gun control, the main issue they are generally trying to solve these days is the mass shooting issue. Not to mention, the comment that started this chain, ("Then we wouldn’t have to hear everyone blame guns and video games instead of people for the next 2 years") is directly referring to debate we have every single time there's a mass shooting. Nobody blames video games when a guy kills himself with a gun, or when there's a gang-related shoot-out. They blame video games when there's a massacre.

I agree that banning guns isn't going to magically fix suicide, (and I think it would take a couple years of an effectively-enforced ban before we started to see a decrease in gang-related violence), but I don't think I was off-topic or confusing when I talked about mass shootings. Yes, some of these mass shooters got their guns illegally, but getting guns illegally is as easy at is for them because these guns are legal in other states, or for other people who passed the requirements. Let's at least try to make it harder for these people to buy such deadly weapons. I don't think America is so severely different from the rest of the developed world that there's nothing we can do to make mass shootings less common.