PA Bill Number: SR77
Title: A Concurrent Resolution petitioning the Congress of the United States to call a Convention for proposing amendments pursuant to Article V of the ...
Description: A Concurrent Resolution petitioning the Congress of the United States to call a Convention for proposing amendments pursuant to Article V of the ...
Last Action: Reported as committed
Last Action Date: Apr 30, 2024
Gun Crime Expert Refutes FBI Report That Declares Mass Shootings are Way Up :: 11/06/2014
An FBI report recently released claims that mass shootings in the United States are sharply up. Not surprisingly, a host of publications latched onto the headline. But did they obscure the changes that made such an alarming proclamation possible?
The New York Times is one such publication that grabbed the gun control friendly F.B.I. report and breathlessly announced it to its audience:
A report released by the F.B.I. on Wednesday confirmed what many Americans had feared but law enforcement officials had never documented: Mass shootings have risen drastically in the past half-dozen years.
There were, on average, 16.4 such shootings a year from 2007 to 2013, compared with an average of 6.4 shootings annually from 2000 to 2006. In the past 13 years, 486 people have been killed in such shootings, with 366 of the deaths in the past seven years. In all, the study looked at 160 shootings since 2000. (Shootings tied to domestic violence and gangs were not included.)
NYT provided a startling graphic to drive home its claim that mass shootings have suddenly spiked to historical levels:
But not all is what it seems: there were important methodological changes to how such data were gathered and included in the F.B.I. report that don’t jibe with the sensational tenor of the headlines. As reported to IJReview.com, Dr. John Lott Jr., President of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) and author of More Guns Less Crime, has reviewed the report and found multiple errors as well as arbitrary definitions that the FBI has never used before. For instance:
- 31 of their 160 cases included since 2000 did not have any deaths or woundings
- 35 of their 160 cases had people shot but fewer than 2 people killed (FBI has always used ‘4 or more people killed’ to qualify an event as a mass shooting until this report)
- Starting the study in 2000 skews the dates to make these incidents look as though they’re on the rise because the data excludes a high number of incidents in the ‘90s.
These methodological changes amount to “cooking the books” in bias of adding more cases to the mass shootings, a government phenomenon that has been seen when it comes to unemployment figures and other public policy matters. IJReview.com followed up with Dr. Lott to seek his explanation for why the F.B.I. would make such drastic changes to the way it had previously classified mass shootings.
JREVIEW: If using the standard FBI criteria for mass shootings were extended backwards in time, is there any spike at all in the 2000s?
LOTT: We have not gone through and collected cases where there are no fatalities, but it seems highly likely that just as they missed a lot of cases where two or more people were killed they also probably missed these even less publicized cases. We didn’t try to look up cases where no one has been killed because it is much more difficult to make sure that you have gotten all these cases.
IJREVIEW: Do you have a good explanation for why the criterion threshold for mass shootings was changed beyond the political? What methodological justification(s) could be cited for the change?
LOTT: No. There might be something, but I don’t know what it would be. Moving from four or more dead to three or more dead was done to make the number of cases larger, and I assume that the same was true for reducing it to include cases where no one was killed.
IJREVIEW: Is there any evidence of undue influence or political pressure to make these methodological changes in order to further a political agenda or policy end?
LOTT: I don’t know. Only the people at the FBI can answer that question.
Dr. Lott is right not to speculate about the motives for why the mass shootings data guidelines were altered; regardless of the rationale, it sure has provided gun control proponents with a juicy headline to blast out on social media, without feeling the need to justify it with the background story.
The news media’s provocative announcement of the F.B.I. report follows on another misleading headline that was generated for gun control supporters that has more recently been corrected.
The Bloomberg-affiliated group Everytown for Gun Safety claimed that only 14% of mass shootings took place in gun-free zones; but unsurprisingly, as AWR Hawkins reported based on a Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) study, the reality is more like 92% of mass shootings since 2009 have occurred in “gun-free” zones.
Let’s take a look at a few facts that put this F.B.I. report in context:
- Just FYI: Mass Shootings are Not on the Rise (Mediaite)
- Gun Murders are at Their Lowest Rate Since 1981 (FactCheck.org)
- Gun Ownership is Up (Factcheck.org)
- Official for Everytown for Safety: More gun control probably won’t prevent many school shootings. (IJReview)
The bottom line is that it doesn’t stop criminals and mentally unstable people from committing terrible atrocities to disarm lawful citizens and prevent them from putting an end to the heinous acts before they get even worse. On the contrary, the evidence points otherwise.
This wasn’t the first time Everytown was caught juicing the data to make its public policy push for more stringent gun control laws. Earlier this year, the activist group released a map claiming to list all of the school shootings since the Sandy Hook tragedy – but 33 of them were found to be questionable.
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/10/187787-exclusive-gun-crime-expert-refutes/
