We live in a city where mass shootings happen weekly. It’s long past the time to call them what they are.

Even as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about gun violence, I’ve found myself increasingly consumed with mass shootings.

Not just the individual acts that have become a mangled stitch in the fabric of our divided nation — like the gunman who Saturday afternoon killed eight people and injured at least seven others at an Allen, Texas outlet mall.

But the actual words. Mass shootings. Mass. Shootings.

The words keep knocking around my head.

There is no single, broadly accepted definition of what that means.

The Inquirer defines a mass shooting as one that occurs in public and kills three or more people.

The FBI classifies mass shootings as four or more deaths in a single incident.

Meanwhile, Congress has used the definition of three or more, and the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks mass shootings, defines them as any incident in which four or more people are injured or killed, a classification also used by some national media outlets. (I often wonder why any shooting with more than one victim isn’t considered a mass shooting, but that may be a column for another day.)

All of that ambiguity, that discretion, really, impacts not just how we view each incident of gun violence in our country, and in our city, but also how we view its victims.

Last weekend, I looked down at my phone to see a media update from the Philadelphia Police Department about overnight incidents that mostly included shootings — which is hardly unusual in our city, where so far this year nearly 600 people have been shot.

But the details of one incident, labeled a quadruple shooting on the 5900 block of Palmetto Street in Lawncrest, were startling.

Victim #1 (17/M), found on the sidewalk suffering from gunshot wounds.

Victim #2 (18/M), found on the front porch suffering from gunshot wounds.

Victim #3 (14/M), found just inside the doorway of the residence.

All three were pronounced dead at the scene.

A fourth victim, a 16-year-old, had arrived at a nearby hospital with a gunshot wound to his abdomen.

There was less information about some of the people believed to be involved, but the scant details that police provided were no less stunning.

Offender #1: 15/M

Offender #2: 16/M

I’ve often heard people in communities hardest hit by the gun violence in our city talk about losing a generation of young people to guns — and for many that may sound like hyperbole. As of Friday, 85 children who were 18 or younger had been shot in Philadelphia so far this year; 14 died.

And here, in just one of the countless shootings in our city, was a stark reminder of just how real that is, and how, increasingly, children are victims and offenders, and sometimes both.

I think that’s why a recent video of a mother speaking at an anti-gun violence event got so much attention.

The mom, whose son was shot and killed in 2021, did not speak so much of what she lost. Instead, she spoke of what her son may have taken from others — maybe even from some of those in that very crowd who were hanging on her every word — before he was killed on the streets. Streets that she took responsibility for putting him on.

That gut punch of messy truth is a part of the layered, complicated story of gun violence in Philadelphia.

But those stories are sometimes harder to wrap our heads around. So instead we lean on delineations, definitions to understand the loss, but also to signal who gets our attention, and as such our sympathy or our neglect.

Like shootings vs. mass shootings.

In 2019, a study from Temple University found that in the 11 years between 2005 and 2015, Philadelphia had seen 244 clusters — patients arriving at the same hospital within 15 minutes of each other, although not necessarily from the same incident — of three or more gunshot patients. And despite no strict definition of what constitutes a mass shooting, doctors called these clusters “everyday mass shootings” of which Philly had seen an average of nearly two each month during the decade that was the focus of the study.

The hope, of course, being that calling these clusters — or incidents or triple or quadruple shootings — what they actually are would elicit the same public outcry as those designated mass shootings.

But we’re still parsing out impact and outcry.

There have been 23 shootings so far this year with three or more victims, according to the Police Department’s shooting database. In essence, a mass shooting every five days. In February, seven people, including a 2-year-old girl and five teenagers, were shot in Strawberry Mansion.

Last year there were 74 shootings with three or more victims. And except for a few rare instances, they are described in all manner of ways except the one they should consistently be referred to: mass shootings, every single one.