Summary: Hysteria about mass killings serves both left and right – so we have a crisis! How can we govern ourselves when bombarded with propaganda which we uncritically believe? Meanwhile, experts’ reports are ignored. So we tumble from fake crisis to fake crisis, unable to face the real perils which threaten us.
Vigil for the victims of a 2015 mass shooting at Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, OR.
“Are Mass Shootings Becoming More Frequent?“
By Alan Reynolds from Cato at Liberty, 15 February 2018.
Terrible mass shootings like the one at a Parkland, Florida high school are so shocking that it is easy to get the impression that mass shootings are increasingly common. The number of deaths from mass shootings has been unusually high since 2007, because of five horrific incidents – Las Vegas (58), the Orlando nightclub (49), Virginia Tech (32), Sandy Hook (27), and the Texas First Baptist Church (26). Statisticians would never try to fabricate a trend from such a small sample, even though the untrained eye may want to.
Last November, however, a Wall Street Journal essay – “How Not to Cover Mass Shootings” by Ari Schulman (“The often sensationalistic media attention given to perpetrators is central to why massacres are happening more”) – claimed …
“It isn’t your imagination: Mass shootings are getting deadlier and more frequent. A recent FBI report on “active shooters” from 2000 to 2015 found that the number of incidents more than doubled from the first to the second half of the period. Four of the five deadliest shootings in American history happened in the past five years, and 2017 already far exceeds any previous year for the number of casualties.”
Editor’s note, a correction: that report is “A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013” by J. Pete Blair and Katherine W. Schweit (2014). The FBI did updates for 2014-15, 2016-17, and 2018. They did a follow-up study “A Study of the Pre-Attack Behaviors of Active Shooters in the United States Between 2000 – 2013” by James Silver et al. (2018). See all their reports here.
That FBI report “identified 160 active shooter incidents that occurred in the United States between 2000 and 2013,” with 486 people killed. The authors literally drew a straight line between just one incident in 2000 (after many in 1999) and 13 incidents in 2013, and called that a “rising trend.”
It is interesting, however, that schools have been the second-highest risk location. The FBI data show that the largest number of active shooting incidents from 2000 to 20016 were in workplaces and other commercial buildings (43%), followed by education facilities (22%), then open spaces (13%), government buildings (11%), residences (5%), health care facilities (3%) and houses of worship (4%).
Editor’s note: School shootings are not becoming more frequent. See this analysis, and articles at NY Magazine and at NPR.
The cited FBI data from 2000 to 2015 omit the two biggest mass shootings after 2015 and others before 2000. In addition to Columbine, there were four other mass shootings in 1999, bringing yearly fatalities to 42 fatalities. We can’t be sure which mass shootings were “the worst in American history,” because (1) history didn’t begin with 2000, and (2) Congress didn’t define mass shootings as 3 killed until 2013, and (3) systematic data about such incidents were not collected until 2012.
Schulman mentioned a longer time series from Mother Jones, but not any data from it, so I created the graph below {click to enlarge} from the Mother Jones data. This project began in 2012 and attempted to recreate earlier years from news records going back to 1982. Early years report at most one or two incidents per year, which may indicate “headline bias” – finding only those incidents that were sufficiently sensational to attract national news coverage.
Importantly, the Mother Jones figures define mass shootings as public attacks in which the shooter and victims were generally unknown to each other, and four or more people were killed. Unlike the FBI’s “active shooting incidents,” where gangs and drugs are frequently involved, Mother Jones excludes all multiple murders related to drugs, gangs or domestic violence. They do include mass shootings by jihadist terrorists, however, which accounted for only 4 of their 98 incidents by my count.
The Mother Jones writers claim that “A recent analysis of this [Mother Jones] database by researchers at Harvard University, further corroborated by a recent FBI study, determined that mass shootings have been on the rise.” We already questioned the FBI trend. What about those “researchers at Harvard University”? Unlike the FBI, who compared the number of incidents between 2000 and 2013 to suggest such a rise, the trio of Harvard and Northeastern University researchers settled for only three years. Rather than counting annual changes in a small number of mass shootings as the FBI did, the Harvard-Northeastern team instead counted the average period of time between incidents, and found them more frequent from 2011 to 2013 than the average from 1982 to 2010 (although the journalists’ count before 2012 is doubtful). …
Editor’s note: This refers to “Rate of Mass Shootings Has Tripled Since 2011,” an article in Mother Jones by Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller (15 October 2014). They are affiliated with Harvard’s School of Public Health and Northeastern University. They used Mother Jones’ database. It does not appear to have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It is absurd to rely on internet searches by the Leftist advocacy magazine Mother Jones, whose methods are not stated – and whose results have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The obvious problem is that data on recent shootings – in the age of national digital databases – is easier to find than reports from 37 years ago (the recency effect).
It seems more transparent to simply examine annual estimates from the graph. Adding a preliminary estimate of 17 deaths from Parkland to the Mother Jones list brings the total number of deaths up to 816 from 98 mass shootings between 1982 and early 2018 – or just 23 deaths per year. That makes this sort of random mass shooting one of the rarest mortality risks imaginable. Falling or the flu are far more dangerous. Even when it comes to guns, 23 deaths a year pales next to the number of homicides by firearms in 2014 alone, which was 11,208 (69% of all homicides) and the number of suicides by firearms, which was 21,386 (50% of all suicides).
Every time one of these random mass shootings occurs, journalists and legislators (like these) invariably seize on the tragedy to lecture about the need for artfully unspecific changes in federal gun control laws. Of all the risks posed by guns or knives, however, random mass shootings are among the least likely.
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Editor’s afterword
“Mass shootings are the health of the media.”
— Comment by Colinsky.
Exaggeration of the mass shooting threat helps both Left and Right. The Left: we need stronger controls on guns. Right: we need more armed citizens (even armed teachers in classrooms). Journalists ignore contrary evidence that would ruin the narrative. Both benefit from our hysteria.
These studies use a variety of databases (none peer-reviewed, so far as I can see) and not even the simplest of statistical tools. Meaningful conclusions about trends based on 20 or 30 data points would give giant error bars, even if the data from earlier years was as reliable as the more recent data (which it is not). Data from earlier is even less reliable (garbage in, garbage out). Take this volatile data series – small numbers of mass murders – subdivide them into small categories (family murders, murders in public spaces, etc) – and crunch them various ways. Ignore population growth (+18% since 1999). You will find a crisis somewhere in that pile.
Based on this weak information, America is taking a wide range of extreme measure to fight a minor threat. For example, see the expensive and psychologically stressful preparations in grade schools against the very rare threat described in this USA Today op-ed.
Better evidence – and graphs that tell the story
(1) The first major work about this subject was Mass Murder in the United States: A History
(2) There have been quite a few articles such as “Mass Shootings in America: Anatomy of a Hyped Statistic” by Carl M. Cannon at Real Clear Politics (although few of this caliber).
(3) RAND does some high quality research.
It is grossly unprofessional of journalists to ignore even high quality research by authoritative sources. Such as “Mass Shootings: Definitions and Trends” by RAND. It is typically RAND: a deep collection of data and incisive analysis.
“The FBI study (Blair and Schweit, 2014) highlighted several key issues in determining trends in mass shootings. First, the absence of a systematic definition of mass shootings can lead to misinterpretation of reported evidence. While the study explicitly stated, “This is not a study of mass killings or mass shootings” (p. 5), extensive media coverage cited the study as evidence of a sharp rise in mass shootings and mass shooting fatalities (Lott, ACJS Today, 2015). …
“For example, the Stanford Mass Shootings in America database, which relies solely on online media sources to identify mass shooting events, cautions its users, ‘Data in the [database] spans a time period that includes the transition from traditional media to digital media in reporting. Numbers of incidents per year should at least in part be assumed to reflect this collection methodology and not just changes in incident frequency.’ …
“Thus, different choices about how to define a mass shooting result in different findings for both the prevalence of these events at a given time and whether their frequency has changed over time.”
See these graphs adapted from data in Krouse and Richardson, 2015. {Click to enlarge.}
Trends in Mass Shooting Incidents, by type of incident.
Trends in Mass Shooting Fatalities, by type of incident.
(4) Essential reading: research by the Congressional Research Service
“Mass Murder with Firearms: Incidents and Victims, 1999–2013” by William J. Krouse and Daniel J. Richardson of the Congressional Research Service, July 2015.
“Despite the public trauma and outcry generated by mass public shootings, there is a dearth of comprehensive, authoritative data on multiple-victim homicide incidents, either committed wholly or partially with firearms. A handful of criminologists, statisticians, sociologists, and other researchers have analyzed the principal source of national homicide statistics that is compiled by the Department of Justice (DOJ) annually, as part of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports and Supplementary Homicide Reports (UCR-SHR).”
Graphs by the CRS show the bottom line.
(5) The Mother Jones database.
“US Mass Shootings, 1982-2019” – Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation. See the Guide to their data. It is a flagrant example of the “looking under the streetlight fallacy”, the bias created by looking at the most available data, but popular because it shows increasing levels of gun violence. Reports of these incidents are easier to find in the modern digital databases than in the past, and especially since the press became interested in them during the past few years. See analysis based on this data.
- “Rate of Mass Shootings Has Tripled Since 2011” by Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller in Mother Jones, 15 October 2014.
- “What have we learned from the time trend of mass shootings in the U.S.?” by Ping-I Lin et al. in PLOS One, 18 October 2018. Analysis using the flawed data from the Mother Jones database.
(6) About school shootings.
- “Schools are safer than they were in the 90s” by Allie Nicodemo and Lia Petronio – “And school shootings are not more common than they used to be.” Research by James Alan Fox, Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern.
- “There Is No ‘Epidemic of Mass School Shootings’” by Eric Levitz at New York Magazine.
- “Despite Heightened Fear Of School Shootings, It’s Not A Growing Epidemic” by Martin Kaste at NPR.
For More Information
Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about gun violence and regulation, and especially these…
- Guns do not make us safer. Why is this not obvious?
- Myth-busting about gun use in the Wild West.
- Do guns make us more safe, or less? Let’s look at the research.
- The number of children killed by guns in America makes us exceptional, not better.
- Debunking the myth: “An armed society is a polite society.”
- Cut thru the lies and myths to understand guns in America.
Books rich with insights about this uniquely American problem.
- The Cattle Towns
- Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History
- “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West
- Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America
- Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment
- Gun Guys: A Road Trip
