At the Washington Post's Wonkblog on Wednesday, Christopher Ingraham claimed that the San Bernardino massacre, which we now know was an act of Islamic terrorism, was the "355th" mass shooting "this year." A Google search on "355th mass shooting this year" (not in quotes) indicates that the stat has become a media meme, repeated at places like the Today Show, PBS, NPR, NBCnews.com, and too many others to mention.
In a New York Times op-ed on Thursday — one which predictably appears not to have made the paper's print edition — Mark Follman, national affairs editor at Mother Jones, of all places, wrote that Ingraham and others in the media, including the Times itself, are wrong — by a factor of 89. As consistently defined until very recently, there have been four mass shootings in the U.S. year, and 73 since 1982.
Ingraham's vastly inflated figure comes from the kind of source the establishment press would be ridiculing endlessly if someone on the center-right used something similar to support their points:
The San Bernardino shooting is the 355th mass shooting this year, according to a mass shooting tracker maintained by the Guns Are Cool subreddit. The Reddit tracker defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people, including the gunman, are killed or injured by gunfire.
The press would also be questioning "who's behind this thing" if it supported center-right points. There appears to be no skepticism or interest in identifying the backgrounds of those behind the subreddit or its related ShootingTracker.com web site. Oh so typically, "the site the information was garnered from is owned by Brock Weller of Portland, Oregon, who claims the site isn't political, yet he supports gun control." (corrected comma placement error in original — Ed.)
A quick visit to the subreddit indicates that it is all gun-grabbing agenda, all-the time. Some choice quotes from its home page:
- "Bottom line? Gun owners have shot 4.5 million Americans in 45 years and managed to kill 1.34 million of them. While some might call that a tragedy, the NRA would call it a good start!"
- "According to gun owners on reddit, blacks/latinos don't count when shot, so we only include them for, like, science and stuff."
- (sarcasm, obviously) "Together, we can loosen whatever watered down laws we have left. Join the NRA and you do just that!"
Follman at Mother Jones, who is himself does not appear to be a supporter of the Second Amendment as written and legally understood since the Supreme Court's Heller decision in 2008, has had enough of the reckless redefinition (HT Instapundit; links are in original; bolds are mine):
How Many Mass Shootings Are There, Really?
... you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015.
At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.
What explains the vastly different count? The answer is that there is no official definition for “mass shooting.” Almost all of the gun crimes behind the much larger statistic are less lethal and bear little relevance to the type of public mass murder we have just witnessed again. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others. Or that a late-night shooting on a street in Savannah, Ga., yesterday that injured three and killed one is in the same category as the madness that just played out in Southern California.
While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem. Everyone is desperate to know why these attacks happen and how we might stop them — and we can’t know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.
For at least the past decade, the F.B.I. regarded a mass shooting as a single attack in which four or more victims were killed. (In 2013, a mandate from President Obama for further study of the problem lowered that threshold to three victims killed.) When we began compiling our database in 2012, we used that criteria of four or more killed in public attacks, but excluded mass murders that stemmed from robbery, gang violence or domestic abuse in private homes. Our goal with this relatively narrow set of parameters was to better understand the seemingly indiscriminate attacks that have increased in recent years, whether in movie theaters, elementary schools or office parks.
... It’s not clear why the Redditors use this much broader criteria. The founder of the “shooting tracker” project, who currently goes by the handle “Billy Speed,” told me it was his choice: “Three years ago I decided, all by myself, to change the United States’ definition of mass shooting.” It’s also not clear how many of those stories — many of them from local outlets, including scant detail — are accurate.
There is value in collecting those stories as a blunt measure of gun violence involving multiple victims. But as those numbers gain traction in the news media, they distort our understanding. According to our research at Mother Jones — subsequently corroborated by the F.B.I. — the more narrowly defined mass shootings have grown more frequent, and overwhelmingly involve legally obtained firearms. Experts in the emerging field of threat assessment believe that this is a unique phenomenon that must be understood on its own.
Follman is too kind when he writes that "it's not clear" why the subreddit is doing what it's doing. They obviously want stricter gun control, and prefer would a nation of unarmed sitting-duck citizens over one whose people can defend themselves.
In the name of "better data," Follman went on to advocate that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regain the legal ability to do gun-related research. That would be nice, if you could trust the CDC to perform objective work. But the government-funded scientific community's cooked research and facts-be-damned advocacy of statist solutions for "climate change" demonstrates that trusting it to provide reliable data in such an important area would be a big mistake. CDC's first move would likely be to adopt the subreddit's definition in the name of fomenting an atmosphere of perpetual crisis — just as the press has. (Sadly, there is also reason to believe that the FBI in the Obama-Holder regime began cooking mass shooting stats as well — but at least there's a prior benchmark to make the cooking detectable.)
Nonetheless the Mother Jones editor's take on keeping the definition of "mass shooting" consistent with what law enforcement has used for some time is a welcome respite from hysteria seen elsewhere.
I should note that the stats at Mother Jones, even appropriately defined, have been questioned in the past. The skepticism goes back almost three years to January 2013. Considering the current hysteria, comes from an interesting source and carrier, i.e., the Boston Globe and Minnesota Public Radio:
I should note that the stats at Mother Jones, even if appropriately defined, have been questioned in the past. The skepticism goes back almost three years to January 2013. Considering the current hysteria, the skepticism came from an ironic source and carrier, respectively, i.e., the Boston Globe and Minnesota Public Radio:
Prof. James Fox, a criminilogist, writes today on Boston.com. He looked at Mother Jones’ methodology and found the magazine had eliminated mass shootings in the past.
That's sort of like "adjusting" prior-year temperature data, isn't it?
Note that in reporting on the dispute, the Globe and MPR accepted the far more limited law enforcement definition of "mass shooting."
But now, each entity has been caught up in the hysteria:
- At MPR — "The shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., was the 355th mass shooting in the U.S. this year — or more than one per day on average so far in 2015 — according to groups monitoring such attacks in recent years."
- The Globe localized it to Massachusetts — "... six mass shootings ... have taken place in Massachusetts so far this year, according to the widely cited Mass Shooting Tracker, a site maintained by Reddit users from the Guns Are Cool forum who have attempted to chronicle every incident in which four or more people were shot since 2013. According to the tracker, there have been more than 350 mass shootings across the U.S. this year."
Shame on them — and everyone else in the complicit media herd.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
