'Cause there are no reasons
What reasons do you need to be shown?
--Boomtown Rats
On cue with our recent missive on source data related to US homicides, this Reason article presents some time series data on US mass shootings. It also disentangles liberal media efforts to conflate domestic with global mass shootings, and mass shootings with mass killings--all in a thinly veiled attempt to suggest that mass shootings in the US have been increasing.
The data presented by James Allen Fox of Northeastern University suggest otherwise. No upward trend is apparent in US mass shootings over the past three decades. On average, there have been about 20 mass shooting incidents per year since 1980 involving just over one gunman per event and about 75 victims per event.
Why then might it truly seem to some people that mass shootings are occurring more frequently? In an editorial written after last Friday's Newtown shooting, Fox cites a 'seemingly insatiable' drive among journalists to build drama out of tragedy. He also suggests that "our collective memories apparently lose sight of other violent moments in recent history when mass shootings have been closely clustered in time, for the most part out of sheer coincidence."
Combine media obsession with tragic drama, particularly as it relates to gun violence, and technology that streams images of distraught school child victims in real time, and you sear vivid imagery into peoples' memories as if "the tragedy happened in your own back yard."
What Fox describes is a context made-to-order for the availability heuristic.
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16 comments:
Total homicides in Chicago rose to 480 for the first eleven months of 2012; a 21 percent increase from last year, despite having some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
~cnsnews.com
Ironic that you should pick that Boomtown Rats song, which happens to be about a school shooting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Don't_Like_Mondays
You're catching on, it appears!
By the way, that's a whole lot of dead people. No theoretical talk can diminish that. You don't have to create drama around this issue. It truly could have happened anywhere.
One death by any cause is sad.
The media and politicians seem to focus primarily on firearms. Why not shift focus to the deranged murderers or laws that they exploit?
Gun free zones have recently been favored environments for the these type of murderers as they plan for and encounter limited resistance.
If a mall, school or movie theatre didn't prohibit guns, the murderers may think twice about attacking even if no occupants actually had a gun.
But anyway, even if guns did not exist, the deranged would probably defer to homemade incendiaries or other means. For this reason, politicians and lawmakers may be unsuccessful in attempts to legislate a utopian environment.
Don,
The mentally ill are not criminal masterminds. Show me one single shred of evidence that having more guns would solve the problem. When has someone ever stepped in and stopped a mass shooting like this? And these guys kill themselves. They know they're not coming out alive. Why would the threat of being shot stop them?
That gun he used fired six bullets per second. The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. Assuming you want to arm kindergarten teachers, I'm sure you'd advocate some sort of lock for them to protect the children. It's hard for me to believe the teacher would have time to make her to her gun safe cubby and take out her AK47 with that rate of bullets.
As far as I'm concerned, let a mentally ill person come with a catapult or a knife and see if he can inflict the same level of damage.
No liberal media or politician is coming to take your precious guns away. And there has been plenty of talk about our mental health system in light of this.
And again, on that Chicago statistic, correlation does not mean causation.
I just hope that both of you are able to recognize the huge bias you have on this issue. I can say for sure, you aren't objective.
Katie
Interestingly, I don't advocate anyone should own guns.
Simply believe that one should have the right to bear arms, whether exercised or not.
Many public facilities have denied this right, causing many unintended consequences to surface.
About a month ago, we had law enforcement (LE) in to speak to college faculty about mass shootings. LE indicated that mass shooters usually study ‘state of the art’ on both the perp and defense sides—and often seek to extend the frontier in their crimes.
Gun free zones are currently at the frontier. As Don notes, nearly all recent mass shootings have occurred in no carry areas. It takes no genius to understand why. Criminals prefer to attack weakness over strength, and surprise over preparation. Gun free zones generally offer both. Even if shooters ultimately have a death wish (not all do e.g., the Batman guy), a gun free zone increases the odds that violent agendas can be achieved before suicide, capture, escape.
‘Mentally ill’ or not, all recent shooters have displayed degrees of premeditation in this regard.
The ‘minutes’ that you seem to discount certainly matter to those in harm’s way. LE indicated that SWAT response times typically average 8-10 mins. As we have seen, perps can do horrific damage in that time. Employees et al with access to firearms would certainly have capacity to reduce damage done by an active shooter. Moreover, knowing defensive firearms are on the premises is likely to deter shooters.
Hopefully you can see that demanding evidence of guns being used to reduce the impact of mass shootings is largely a non sequitur when shooters generally target gun free zones. However, there have been some cases. Pearl HS, MS 1997 and New Life Church, CO 2007 come to mind.
There are also some schools (e.g., Harrold, TX) that have permitted teachers to carry. Deterrence of crime, of course, is harder to measure and tends to fall under Bastiat’s (1850) category of ‘that which is not seen.’
The world will always have a percentage of individuals capable of heinous acts. The terrorist in Oklahoma City years ago murdered over 150 people with a truck and common chemicals.
we can't eliminate these events, but perhaps we can reduce them or their potential lethal impact. I'm not willing to throw my hands up in the air and say, "oh well. this is the price we pay for being human.".
interesting matt. but can you prove that these people target schools because they are gun free zones or is there another reason?
Another question. If it's only more guns that make us safer, why are Americans at a higher risk of dying from gun violence than so many other industrialized nations? If criminal masterminds exploit gun free zones, why are they exploiting strict gun laws in other countries?
I've stated repeatedly that I don't think guns are the only issue here. To think that "liberals" are out to grab guns is pure spin and the worst kind of close minded cynicism.
Yrs, but if we could have stopped it, it's way more than sad.
The more appropriate statement may be that these incidents are the price of *freedom* when evil walks the earth. These pages have frequently noted the fundamental tradeoff between freedom and safety. Police states can be quite secure, but at the expense of freedom. This country was founded on the idea that liberty is preferable to security, as famously punctuated by Patrick Henry.
To your ‘proof’ question, not all shooters have elected schools. Recent venues have included theaters and malls as well. What they have in common is no carry status. Both reason and evidence suggest gun free zones as magnets for criminals.
To your ‘international comparison’ question, I have yet to dive much into comparative data on this issue. I have seen contradictory cross-country data/claims similar to domestic context. For example, anti-gun types often observe that Britain has stronger gun control laws and lower murder rates than the US. But reports I have read indicate that Britain has had lower murder rates than the US for more than two centuries, and during much of that period Britain has had no more stringent gun control laws than the US. Moreover, British gun related crime rates are far higher today than prior to imposition of gun controls.
To the extent the inter-country differences you claim are true, perhaps there is bound to be a base difference in gun-related incidents in the US due to our ‘freedom over security’ design preference. Perhaps there are other factors involved. Whatever the ‘base rate,’ I suspect that examination of longitudinal data before and after *changes* in gun control policies in various countries will indicate a generally *negative* relationship between violent crime and gun ownership. Pretty sure this type of research has been done but have yet to study it.
Finally, I hope you’re right about liberals not out to grab guns here. Markets certainly do not believe you, as guns and ammo are flying off the shelves since last Fri, seemingly in direct proportion to the intensity of rhetoric and initial actions coming from the Left.
Thanks Matt. I think that the gun and ammo selling is certainly a niche thing. I suspect (without evidence) that the people buying them are stockpiling, not running out to make their first gun purchase. This is a gun manufacturers dream. Perhaps the extended silence by the NRA helps fuel that panic. Mark Warner (not a liberal) seems to agree that there is some common ground here. But I know you don't like it.
Katie
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