New Study Confirms Mass Shootings Have Seen Little Increase Since 1970
Via Jesse Walker at the reason.com
The report shies away from finding a broad message in the data, but Fox—who praises the study as “very thorough”—sees a moral here. “No matter how you cut it, there’s no epidemic,” he says. “This report should calm the fears that many people have that these numbers are out of control.”
This report takes its data from two different areas. FBI’s series of supplemental homicide reports from 1999 to 2013, of which several scholars addressed to fix errors in the statistics, and then a dataset by Grant Duwe, a criminologist at the Minnesota Department of Corrections and author of Mass Murder in the United States: A History.
The report says that since 1970, the average of mass shootings varied but was just a little bit higher from 2009-’13 and the number of deaths was higher, but concludes “If 2012 were excluded, the averages would actually have been lower than the preceding five-year period.”
Expert on mass murders and professor of crimino
logy at Northeastern University James Fox says something along the same line, that there is “no solid trend” in the numbers. He said there is a large range in the numbers and they tend to vary often.
The mass shootings with the CSR is defined as any gun crime where four or more people are murdered in a single accident. But that covers a large range of shootings, not just your “mass public shootings” which are like the Lafayette shooting where a person opens fire on random people in public. There’s “familicide mass shootings” which a person kills family and then there’s felony mass shootings committed at the same time as a robbery or other crime.
So this is a lot of technical information but just pay attention, 4.4 is the average mass public shootings per year since 1999, but familicide mass shootings came in at 8.5, and felony mass shootings was 8.3. So this means that all that hype about a growing plague of mass shootings is misleading, felony and family mass shootings are twice as common.
Public mass shootings are covered by media way more, because the average person is more fearful of a random public shooter than a person killing in their family. What prevents felony shootings, such as a burglar shooting? YOU. Citizens armed and prepared for defensive gun use, and we all know they happen every day.
Raw totals from this study show an increase of mass public shootings from 1.1 incidents per year in the 70’s to 4.1 in the 2000s. However this doesn’t take into account the population growth since then and the numbers are so minimal that Fox says “Basically, there is no rise, there are some years that are bad, some not so bad.”
So mass public shootings happen extremely rarely and the chart shows that per 10 million americans the victims start from about .5 a year and then goes to 2 at the highest. They’re rare and have had a small rise, but look at them compared to all gun murder victims that happen at the same time.
Firearm murders and crime has been steadily decreasing for quite some time, and the facts make us positive the credit belongs to defensive gun use.
So here are the facts and prepare yourself for some serious thought chewing. The FBI has reports that show a direct correlation between an increase of firearm purchases and reduced crime. Forbes also writes about studies done by Pew Research Center and the U.S Department of Justice that show the same link between reduction of crime and increased gun sales.
Not only that but the article talks about how Chicago and other cities, which are continually tightening gun control, have seen a huge jump in murders. Still unconvinced?
The number of Americans who believe having a gun in the house increases safety has doubled since 2000: 6 out of 10 Americans agree with this.
The Wall Street Journal also writes about how more guns = less crime.
It’s also worth noting that gun-ownership rates in the Midwest (39 percent) and South (50 percent) far exceed gun-ownership rates in the Northeast (22 percent), yet violent crime is down more in the Midwest and South than it is in the Northeast, according to the FBI statistics. And rural areas, where gun-ownership rates also are higher than average, saw a larger reduction in violent crime that metropolitan areas, where gun-ownership rates are lower than average.
This doesn’t include the bottomless pit of defensive gun use instances in which people’s lives are saved every day.
I think this large decrease of crime since the 70s has been because of the awareness of citizens like us, who have seen others be devastated by crime, and have refused to just stand by and let it happen. We refuse to continue watching leaders in our government weaken our country and we refuse be left defenseless at the most crucial moment. We have seen this happen to other countries in history and we refuse to become like them.
By arming ourselves and giving a heavy consequence to those with bad intentions, we refuse to let crime win. We refuse to let criminals and selfish people victimize us, and we will continue to refuse to have ours and our family’s lives threatened and possibly taken away by not exercising our right to the Second Amendment.
