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Contrary To The Propaganda, America Doesn’t Lead The World In Mass Shootings

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Many Communists, propagandists, useful idiots and other assorted anti-constitutional politicians promote the lie that America leads the world in mass shootings.  They do this especially following a mass shooting in the States, especially one at a school.  Not only do they fail to realize that many of their own actions have made America’s schools soft targets by implementing them as “gun free zones,” a place where more than 90% of mass shootings take place in America, but they often lie about the numbers they quote and completely disregard the verifiable evidence of just how much worse it is outside the USA.  So, in a recent op-ed, John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, and Michael Weisser, former professor of history at Columbia University, have sought to set the record straight.

Pointing to Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Sobarkah’s words, “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world” and then pointed to a then-unpublished paper by criminologist Adam Lankford.

They write:

Lankford’s claim received coverage in hundreds of news stories all over the world. It still gets regular coverage. Purporting to cover all mass public shootings around the world from 1966 to 2012, Lankford claimed that the United States had 31 percent of public mass shooters despite having less than 5 percent of the population.

But this isn’t nearly correct. The whole episode should provide a cautionary tale of academic malpractice and how evidence is often cherry-picked and not questioned when it fits preconceived ideas.

Lankford’s study reported that over the 47 years there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. Lankford hasn’t released his list of shootings or even the number of cases by country or year. We and others, both in academia and the media, have asked Lankford for his list, only to be declined. He has also declined to provide lists of the news sources and languages he used to compile his list of cases.

These omissions are important because Lankford’s entire conclusion would fall apart if he undercounted foreign cases due to lack of news coverage and language barriers.

Lankford cites a 2012 New York Police Department report which he claims is “nearly comprehensive in its coverage of recent decades.” He also says he supplemented the data and followed “the same data collection methodology employed by the NYPD.” But the NYPD report warns that its own researchers “limited [their] Internet searches to English-language sites, creating a strong sampling bias against international incidents,” and thus under-count foreign mass shootings.

The two then pointed to a new report that was put out by Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center.  That report uses the very same definition of mass public shootings that Lankford also used.

However, here’s what they discovered:

We know of no way to discover most of the cases where four people have been shot to death in an incident in Africa or many other parts of the world during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s, and that is the reason the new study just looked at the last 15 years from 1998 to 2012 of the 47 years he examined.

Lankford’s data grossly undercount foreign attacks. We found 1,423 attacks outside the United States. Looking at just a third of the time Lankford studied, we still found 15 times as many shooters.

Even when we use coding choices that are most charitable to Lankford, such as excluding any cases of insurgencies or battles over territory, his estimate of the US share of shooters falls from 31 percent to 1.43 percent. It also accounts for 2.1 percent of murders, and 2.88 percent of their attacks. All these are much less than the United States’ 4.6 percent share of the population.

Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the US ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia all have at least 45 percent higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.

“When Lankford’s data is revised, the relationship between gun ownership rates and mass public shooters disappears,” Lott and Weisser write.  “How could that be? One possibility is that guns don’t just enable mass shooters; gun owners can also deter and prevent such shootings. Another is that culture — not gun ownership — is a bigger factor in shootings.”

That’s interesting, isn’t it?  You see, quite often in the media, they will attempt to cite raw numbers without pulling back and seeing the big picture, which then, makes the case more clearly for those who support the right to keep and bear arms and for the government to have no say in restricting or regulating those arms.

I’ve written about those like Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) and citing bad data from lying Michael Bloomberg organizations.  I’ve pointed out incredible mass shootings that virtually no one talks about anymore, including two of the deadliest school shootings in history that occurred outside the US, one that claimed over 2,000 lives and another that resulted in over 300 killed and over 800 injured.

All of the talk about gun confiscation, gun control and mass shootings in the media and from politicians is for one end, and that end is so that law-abiding citizens are left defenseless and the government and criminals are the ones with guns, and we all know how that turns out when it’s accomplished.

Article posted with permission from Freedom Outpost


Tim Brown

Tim Brown is a Christian and lover of liberty, a husband to his "more precious than rubies" wife, father of 10 "mighty arrows" and jack of all trades. He lives in the US-Occupied State of South Carolina, is the Editor at SonsOfLibertyMedia.com, GunsInTheNews.com and TheWashingtonStandard.com. and SettingBrushfires.com; and also broadcasts on The Sons of Liberty radio weekdays at 6am EST and Saturdays at 8am EST. Follow Tim on Twitter. Also check him out on Gab, Minds, and USALife.
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