Democrats Say America Is The Worst Western Country For Mass Shootings. That's A Lie.

[www.dailywire.com]

There’s a myth that has been propagated by Democrats after mass shootings: mass shootings are far more common in the United States than in other Western countries.

To wit, Barack Obama, June 18, 2015, after the Charleston, North Carolina mass shooting: "Let's be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

Former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, June 23, 2015: "The United States is the only advanced country where this kind of mass violence occurs," he said.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, after the Florida Valentine’s Day shooting: "This happens nowhere else other than the United States of America."

But as Investor’s Business Daily points out, “a study of global mass-shooting incidents from 2009 to 2015 by the Crime Prevention Research Center, headed by economist John Lott, shows the U.S. doesn't lead the world in mass shootings. In fact, it doesn't even make the top 10, when measured by death rate per million population from mass public shootings.”

Here’s the list of the 18 countries with the top death rate per million people from mass public shootings from 2009 through 2015:

Norway: 1.888
Serbia: 0.381
France: 0.347
Macedonia: 0.337
Albania: 0.206
Slovakia: 0.185
Switzerland: 0.142
Finland: 0.132
Belgium: 0.128
Czech Republic: 0.123
United States: 0.089
Austria: 0.068
The Netherlands: 0. 051
Canada: 0.032
England: 0.027
Germany: 0.023
Russia: 0.012
Italy: 0.009

Norway’s rate is undoubtedly highest because of the massacre in 2011 when a mass shooter killed 77 people.

The study adds, “Some people have defended President Obama’s statement by pointing to the word ‘frequency.’ But, even if one puts it in terms of frequency, the president’s statement is still false, with the US ranking 12th compared to European countries. … There were 27% more casualties per capita from mass public shootings in EU than US from 2009-15.”

Further, "There were 16 cases where at least 15 people were killed. Out of those cases, four were in the United States, two in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany's and five times the U.K.'s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher."

The murders from mass shootings in America are horrifying and brutal. But in the wake of another attack, it should be incumbent on all people on all sides not to demagogue the issue.

Even ONE is too many WAKE UP! This is like the downfall of Rome people are loosing their minds and you're not helping matters by skewing statistics to stick up for what is abhorrent, DEGENERATION...

Tell me how you would defend yourself if a thief had a gun in your face, if a guy was raping your wife, if a criminal was beating up your children? If the government was rounding up people for mass extermination?

Plant trees and cultivate Paradise like my LIFE and others LIVES depend on it (it does)...

Quote
NuNativs
people are loosing their minds and you're not helping matters by skewing statistics to stick up for what is abhorrent, DEGENERATION...

The only people losing their minds are the Libs/Gun-Grabbers.

Please be specific - which statistic or statistics did I skew?

I'm sticking up for what is natural, common-sense - Wanting to protect oneself and one's family against Evil Criminals, Murderers, Rapists, Thieves, Gangs, Drug Addicts, Psychos and Tyrannical Governments.

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And you are spewing Emotion, Fear and Control. You are sticking up for Evil Criminals, Murderers, Rapists, Thieves, Gangs, Drug Addicts, Psychos and Tyrannical Governments.

Looks like Obama told many lies about mass shootings and violence by the US compared to the EU -

Fact: The EU has had more mass shootings than the US.

Fact : There were 27% more casualties per capita from mass public shootings in EU than US from 2009-15

UPDATED: Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Europe

[crimeresearch.org]

Comparing death rates from mass shootings per million people, from 2009 through December 2015, the US ranks no. 11 behind

Norway number 1,

Serbia number 2,

France number 3,

Macedonia number 4,

Albania number 5,

Slovakia number 6,

Switzerland number 7,

Finland number 8,

Belgium number 9,

Czech Republic number 10

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"But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany’s and five times the U.K.’s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher.

Small countries such as Norway, Israel and Australia may have only one major attack each, one-fourth of what the U.S. has suffered, but the US population is vastly greater. If they suffered attacks at a rate adjusted for their population, Norway, Israel and Australia would have had attacks that were respectively 16, 11, and 3 times greater than the US."

Read the rest of the article for all the lies told about the US and mass shootings and violence and check out more graphs that show The Facts.

"Multiple bogus “statistics” about the frequency of school shootings have been peddled relentlessly. James Fox at USA Today does a good job of debunking them:

We were informed, for example, that since 2013 there has been an average of one school shooting a week in the U.S., and 18 since the beginning of this year. While these statistics were not exactly lies or fake news, they involved stretching the definition of a school shooting well beyond the limits of most people’s imagination.
***
Nearly half of the 290 were completed or attempted suicides, accidental discharges of a gun, or shootings with not a single individual being injured. Of the remainder, the vast majority involved either one fatality or none at all.
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Since 1990, there have been 22 shootings at elementary and secondary schools in which two or more people were killed, not counting those perpetrators who committed suicide.

Whereas five of these incidents have occurred over the past five-plus years since 2013, claiming the lives of 27 victims (17 at Parkland), the latter half of the 1990s witnessed seven multiple-fatality shootings with a total of 33 killed (13 at Columbine).

In fact, the 1997-98 school year was so awful, with four multiple-fatality shooting sprees at the hands of armed students (in Pearl, Miss.; West Paducah, Ky.; Jonesboro, Ariz.; and Springfield, Ore.), that then-President Clinton formed a White House expert committee to advise him."

US gun control advocates exaggerate benefits of Australia's gun restrictions

[www.foxnews.com]

After each mass public shooting in the U.S. – such as the horrific attack at a Florida high school last week that killed 17 people – gun control advocates keep pointing to Australia as the role model America should follow to reduce gun deaths.

If only reducing crime and suicides was so easy. In reality, gun control efforts in Australia have not been as successful as we’ve been led to believe.

Instead, news organizations such as USA Today, the New York Times and the Washington Post have all run stories in recent days crediting Australia’s 1996-1997 gun buyback program with cutting the firearm homicide and suicide rates in half, and eliminating mass public shootings.

In Australia, certain types of guns – including automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns – were banned, and the government ordered a mandatory buyback of all guns that had been declared illegal. The sale of other types of guns was not banned and th

But looking at simple before-and-after averages of gun deaths in Australia regarding the gun buyback is extremely misleading. Firearm homicides and suicides were falling from the mid-1980s onwards, so you could pick out any subsequent year and the average firearm homicide and suicide rates after that year would be down compared to the average before it.

The question is whether the rate of decline changed after the gun buyback law went into effect. But the decline in firearm homicides and suicides actually slowed down after the buyback.

Australia’s buyback resulted in almost 1 million guns being handed in and destroyed, but after that private gun ownership once again steadily increased and now exceeds what it was before the buyback.

In fact, since 1997 gun ownership in Australia grew over three times faster than the population (from 2.5 million to 5.8 million guns).

Gun control advocates should have predicted a sudden drop in firearm homicides and suicides after the buyback, and then an increase as the gun ownership rate increased again. But that clearly didn’t happen.

For other crimes, such as armed robbery, what happened is the exact opposite of what was predicted. The armed robbery rate soared right after the gun buyback, then gradually declined.

Gun control advocates like to note that there has been no mass public shooting in Australia since the buyback. But they are simply picking out a country that happens to “prove” what they want it to prove.

European countries such as Belgium, France and the Netherlands have even stricter gun control laws than Australia does, but their mass public shooting rates are at least as high as those in the United States.

During the Obama administration, the per capita casualty rate from shootings in the European Union was actually 27 percent higher than the U.S. rate.

Even excluding fights over sovereignty and including the recent attacks in Las Vegas, the Texas church shooting in November, and the Florida school massacre, the number of mass shootings in the rest of the world has been much worse than in the U.S. since at least as far back as 1970.

New Zealand also provides a useful comparison to Australia. They are both isolated, island nations, and have similar socioeconomics and demographics. Their mass murder rates were nearly identical prior to Australia’s gun buyback.

From 1980 to 1996, Australia’s mass murder rate was 0.0042 incidents per 100,000 people. New Zealand’s was 0.0050 incidents per 100,000 people. After 1997, both countries experienced similar drops in mass murders, even though New Zealand had not altered its gun control laws.

It would be just as misleading for gun control critics to cite only New Zealand as it is for gun control advocates to cite Australia.

The right approach is to look at a lot of similar places and see what gun control measures actually made a difference. To do just that, Bill Landes of the University of Chicago and I collected data on all multiple-victim public shootings in all the United States from 1977 to 1999.

We examined 13 different gun control policies, including: waiting periods, registration, background checks, bans on assault weapons, the death penalty, and harsher penalties for committing a crime with a firearm.

But only one policy reduced the number and severity of mass public shootings: allowing victims to defend themselves with permitted, concealed handguns.

Since 1950, all but six U.S. mass public shootings have happened in areas where general citizens were banned from having guns. And in Europe, every single mass public shooting has occurred where guns are banned.

Killers have good reason to avoid places where people have guns. In dozens of cases concealed-carry gun permit holders have stopped mass public shootings. In the Texas church shooting last year, the killer was killing the wounded when a man living near the church shot him.

Yet gun control advocates keep focusing on laws that won’t make any difference. None of the mass public shootings since at least 2000 would have been stopped by universal background checks.

Relying on Australia requires a misreading of the evidence, and requires that we ignore what has happened in all the other countries with strict regulations. The truth is that gun control hasn't worked for anyone.

New research debunks ‘cherry-picked’ pro-gun control study the mainstream media routinely cite

[www.theblaze.com]

One of the most prominent talking points gun control activists employ is their claim that mass public shootings don’t happen in other countries with the frequency that they do in the United States. The claim was often repeated during the Obama administration, and continues to be parroted by the mainstream media.

“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,” former President Barack Obama claimed after the mass killing in San Bernardino in Dec. 2015.

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Lie by Obama on US Mass Shootings -

Obama: U.S. mass shootings problem 'has no parallel'

[www.usatoday.com]

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But new research debunks the study gun control advocates often cite. That study, published by criminologist Adam Lankford, claims the U.S. accounted for 31 percent of all public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012 in the world despite having less than 5 percent of the world’s population.

What do THE FACTS say?

John. R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, released a comprehensive study last week debunking the myth that mass shootings are a uniquely American problem.

He discovered that, over a 15-year period from 1998-2012, the U.S. accounted for less than 3 percent of the world’s public mass shootings and less than 2 percent of public mass shooters.

“By our count, the US makes up less than 1.43% of the mass public shooters, 2.11% of their murders, and 2.88% of their attacks. All these are much less than the US’s 4.6% share of the world population. Attacks in the US are not only less frequent than other countries, they are also much less deadly on average,” the study found.

One of the biggest problems with Lankford’s study, the CPRC alleges, is that Lankford was never honest about that data he included in his study, massively skewing its results.

From the CPRC:

Lankford’s study reported that from 1966 to 2012, there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. We find that Lankford’s data represent a gross undercount of foreign attacks. Our list contains 1,448 attacks and at least 3,081 shooters outside the United States over just the last 15 years of the period that Lankford examined. We find at least fifteen times more mass public shooters than Lankford in less than a third the number of years.

Even when we use coding choices that are most charitable to Lankford, his 31 percent estimate of the US’s share of world mass public shooters is cut by over 95 percent.

Indeed, Lott wrote in the New York Post: “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.”

How did Lankford respond?
He told multiple news outlets: “I am not interested in giving any serious thought to John Lott or his claims.”

More Inconvenient TRUTHS, FACTS and STATISTICS -

New CPRC Research: How a Botched Study Fooled the World About the U.S. Share of Mass Public Shootings: U.S. Rate is Lower than Global Average

[crimeresearch.org]

Shock study: U.S. had far fewer mass shootings than previously reported

[www.washingtontimes.com]

A shock 2016 study argued that the U.S. accounted for nearly one-third of all mass shootings, sparking global headlines about the dangers of an American gun culture.

Now another researcher says the original study “botched” the data.

John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, crunched the numbers and said his count shows that the U.S. had less than 3 percent of the world’s mass public shootings over a 15-year period.

That is smaller than the 4.6 percent of the world’s population that the U.S. accounts for — and way less than the 31 percent of global mass shooters that Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama, claimed in his widely publicized studies.

“If you fix the data, you get the opposite result from him,” Mr. Lott said. “He has the United States way out there, all by itself in terms of mass public shootings. He’s simply wrong. The United States, when I go through this, ranks 58th in the world in the rate of mass public shootings and 62nd in the world in terms of murders from mass public shootings.”

Mr. Lott said he tried to get Mr. Lankford to disclose his data but the professor won’t share it with him or other researchers, making it impossible to double-check the original claims or to figure out why Mr. Lott’s numbers are so different.

Mr. Lankford’s research, first released in 2015 and presented to the American Sociological Association in 2016, garnered stories from The New York Times, Newsweek, CNN and The Washington Post, among dozens of others, that said it was proof, as CNN put it, that “the U.S. has the most mass shootings.”

Mr. Lankford studied the period from 1966 to 2012 using data from the New York City Police Department’s active shooter report, a 2014 FBI active shooter report and some foreign accounts.

He identified 292 incidents worldwide in which at least four people were killed — the FBI’s definition of a mass murder. Of those, 90 were in the U.S. — 31 percent of the total among 171 countries.

The professor also found that shooters in the U.S. were more likely to arm themselves with multiple weapons and more likely to attack at schools and business locations.

Mr. Lankford, who claimed to be the first to attempt a global survey, said his results suggested there was something to the American psyche that left people disaffected when they failed to achieve the American dream. He said they turn to violent outbursts with firearms.

“It may thus be the lofty aspirations and broken dreams of a tiny percentage of America’s students and workers — combined with their mental health problems, distorted perceptions of victimization, delusions of grandeur, and access to firearms — that makes them more likely to commit public mass shootings than people from other cultures,” he postulated in his 2015 paper.

Yet he has failed to post the data on all 292 shootings. Early academic critics said it’s easy to find data for U.S. shootings but trickier for tracking incidents in foreign countries.

Mr. Lott, meanwhile, turned to data from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database and followed up with Nexis and web searches to try to catch cases that the database missed.

He said good data exist only for recent years, so he looked from 1998 to 2012 and found 1,491 mass public shootings worldwide. Of those, only 43 — or 2.88 percent — were in the U.S. Divide that by per capita rates, and the U.S. comes in 58th, behind Finland, Peru, Russia, Norway and Thailand — though still worse than France, Mexico, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Looked at from the number of victims in those shootings, the U.S. again ranks low, with just 2.1 percent of mass shooting deaths, Mr. Lott said.

He has released a 451-page appendix detailing each of the shootings and his thoughts on how he classified it, and he shared his data with other academics, including, he said, Mr. Lankford.

The professor, though, told The Washington Times that he wasn’t going to get drawn into a back-and-forth over the issue.

“I am not interested in giving any serious thought to John Lott or his claims,” he said in response to an email seeking comment.

Another professor, Carl Moody, an economist who studies crime at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, said Mr. Lott got it right.

“When I saw John Lott’s paper, I went to the Global Terrorism Database … and counted the number of mass shootings in the U.S. compared to everywhere else. Lott is right,” he said by email.

He added: “By the way, anybody can do this. The GTD database is free and available to all.”

Mr. Lott said his study still overstates the U.S. problem compared with the rest of the world.

He said it’s easy to get good data about shootings in the U.S., but tracking down attacks in far corners of the globe is tough. In some countries, he said, violence is so common that shootings of four people — the minimum for a mass public attack — merits little or no coverage.

Then there are places such as the Solomon Islands that suppress news reports “The police made it clear that since their nation gets most of its revenue from tourism, they saw little benefit to providing this information,” he said.

America doesn’t actually lead the world in mass shootings

[nypost.com]

The claim that the US has by far the most mass public shootings in the world drives much of the gun-control debate. Many argue that America’s high rate of gun possession explains the high rate of mass shootings.

“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,” President Barack Obama warned us. To justify this claim and many other similar quotes, Obama’s administration cited a then-unpublished paper by criminologist Adam Lankford.

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.

Does Lankford’s paper also have that problem?

A new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center, which one of us heads, has just finished collecting cases using the same definition of mass public shootings used by Lankford.

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.

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.

The media should be wary of any researchers who fail to let others look at their data. At least on this point, the intellectual base for liberal thunder about mass public shootings is wrong.

John Lott is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Michael Weisser was a professor of history at Columbia University.