On Wednesday evening, a rifle-toting gunman murdered 18 people and wounded at least 13 more in Lewiston, Maine, when he opened fire at two separate locations—a bowling alley, followed by a bar. A manhunt is still underway for 40-year-old suspect Robert Card, a trained firearms instructor with the U.S. Army Reserve who, just this summer, spent two weeks in a mental hospital after reporting that he was hearing voices and threatening to shoot up a military base.
While the other late-night talk show hosts stuck to poking fun at new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Thursday night, Stephen Colbert took his rebuke of the Louisiana congressman to a whole other level.
“Now, we know the arguments,” Colbert said of the do-nothing response politicians generally have to tragedies such as this. “Some people are going to say this is a mental health issue. Others are going to say it’s a gun issue. But there’s no reason it can’t be both.”
Gun laws, yes. Gun deaths, not as much The US does have a lot, I won’t argue with that, but I would not say it’s unique.
Gun crimes are committed by a very small portion of gun owners, so the statistics aren’t so simple. It’s like minnows and whales in sales. The issue is that if someone wanting to commit a crime is choosing not to because they worry their victim might turn out to have a gun and shoot them in defense, and then you remove that deterrent you end up with more crime. The number of guns randomly distributed would seem to correlate with increased violence and crime, but the distribution matters a lot. If you double the number of guns but somehow limited them only to the least criminal and most responsible, you’d probably actually decrease crime despite the number of guns going up. So whether a 90% decrease amongst good gun owners with 10% decrease amongst bad gun owners is actually a net positive, I’m honestly not sure.
I’ll put it this way, there’s never been a mass shooting where I live. Not one in my entire life. There’s only been a handful of people who’ve died to guns at all, and all of those people were killed by armed police officers.
The stats speak for themselves. Each bad gun owner can mass murder 20-30 people if they so choose. And if you’re gonna commit a mass shooting I don’t reckon you really give a shit if someone else there has a gun. Probably pretty laissez-faire about living at all if you’re willing to mow down as many people as you possibly can. That doesn’t happen here. That is a product of your country that continues to happen over and over again.
I do live in the US, and there’s never been a mass shooting where I live, either. The US is a very large place. Things vary quite a bit from place to place. A shooting totally could happen near me, I’m just saying the size of the US and its large population does make them look like a more common thing than they actually are sometimes.
I agree that public indiscriminate mass shooters probably are not deterred by the thought of someone else having a gun and shooting them to stop them. In fact that may be what they want a lot of times. Public mass shootings are a very small portion of gun deaths, though, even in the US. There are some lists of shootings that include things that don’t really belong. Gang violence is the one most often cited, if 3 people from one gang and 2 from another shoot at each other over a dispute, that’s technically a mass shooting by many definitions, even though its not really contributing to anyone else’s safety.
Those stats hide what’s truly happening (EDIT: Hide is the wrong word, these stats are deliberately dishonest).
TL;DR: Those stats are listed per capita, and USA is by far the largest country on that list. Statistics have been averaged through 2009-2015 even if listed countries (A lot of them) have only one shooting in the time period. The USA has like a dozen mass shootings in this time period. Multiplie countries are on this list because they had 1 shooting in 6 years and have a population of less than 20million people. It’s deeply dishonest.
Norway is at the top due to the 2011 attack that was incredibly deadly. Norway has a population of 5.4 million people today.
All of these statistics are listed as per capita. So because Norway had an incredibly deadly attack and is a small country compared to the USA, it becomes a clear outlier. The site lists norway as having 1.888 deaths per million people, yearly average from 2009 - 2015. Norway has 5.4 million people today. That’s about 10 people dying to mass shootings a year. But wait! Remember, in 2011, 77 died total in the event but 67 were victims of a mass shooting. That reaaaaally skews that figure. EDIT: It is also the only shooting that contributes to Norway’s Stats in this list.
None of those countries on that list have more than 100 million people today except for the USA (335 million according to wikipedia) (Edit: and Russia, 140 mil). There was a clear choice to massage the data to use per capita to push the message that “the USA isn’t that bad” and it’s still coming up #11.
This is the reason that other sources don’t report these statistics as per capita - they’re incredibly rare, even in the USA. 99.9999% of people will not experience them. This doesn’t change the fact they are terrible tragedies and completely preventable. You can easily see in other, less biased sources that this is a US problem.
I highlighted Norway because it was especially glaringly deceptive, I expect the other statistics have similar problems.
Further edit: Look at the spreadsheet this data is from (Here’s just European countries):
Spreadsheet
THERE IS ONLY ONE MASS SHOOTING EVENT FOR SOME OF THESE COUNTRIES and it’s being averaged over a period of 6 years! LOL. LMAO, even. These countries are not having mass shootings every year like the USA is. These stats are so dishonest. Norway has only the 2011 attack!
The US list is longer than the list of all of europe:
US list
This is the source:
Source for bad data
I appreciate your detailed response, but can you explain why per capita is hiding rather than revealing? To me it only makes sense to look at per capita. If you didn’t, and said the US had way more shootings than Norway, I’d say, “yeah, duh, the US has a lot more people so of course it will have more.” You have to compare to the population or else it’s all meaningless. Maybe you mean something else and I’m misunderstanding.
I was familiar with the one Norway shooting and how that’s an outlier, but I don’t think the article’s argument rests that strongly on that one data point.
It does strongly rest on that one data point. Norway has only one data point for that time range.
Just like Albania, with one data point.
Just like Finland, Italy, England, Germany, Belgium… with one data point. The spreadsheets are images and I’m tired of looking at them (I would prefer the actual spreadsheets obviously). France appears 3 or 4 times I think, it appears the most.
It’s a 6 year average, so the list becomes a list of small countries with exactly 1 shooting in 6 years, vs the 25 mass shootings the USA had in the same time period. It takes only 1 event to make it to the top of the list due to population size.
Notice, Spain isn’t on this list, nor is Poland, etc. Are they truly different than the rest of the countries on this list? Or did they just happen to not have one single shooting in this 6 years?
If the statistician truly wanted to compare US vs Europe per capita, they needed to not split the data up by country (but of course this wouldn’t produce the message they wanted). Basically, using a measure of 6 years is far too small for events this rare. Doing it for a longer period of time might cause problems, too. However, if this was done per year and not over an average of 6 years, the USA would consistently be on the top, except for 2011. Making it per capita and over 6 years is doing a lot of work!
I’m not sure that’s the best site to use for support.
The Crime Prevention Research Center is a nonprofit founded in 2013 by John Lott, author of the book “More Guns, Less Crime.” He is best known as an advocate in the gun rights debate, particularly his arguments against restrictions on owning and carrying guns.
I checked an npr article about the subject and we seem pretty bad…but far from the worst. Should do better. Could be far worse.
It doesn’t seem like the FEE article citing CPRC and the NPR article disagree very much. But it’s true that some people will trust the NPR one much more, so that’s valuable.
Edit: I mean, the numbers in the articles aren’t necessarily the same, but the idea that the US could be better and could be worse is present in both.