At Real Clear Policy: The Truth About Mass Shootings

Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed at Real Clear Policy.

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When another shooting happens at a place such as a school or a mall, politicians and the media are apt to claim that many hundreds of mass shootings occur each year. “Over the last year since Uvalde, our country has experienced a staggering 650 mass shootings,” President Joe Biden claimed last year. After a mass murder in Lewiston, Maine in late October, CNN said that there had already been “586 mass shootings” that year.

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These statements give an incorrect impression that there are massacres every day like the infamous 2022 Uvalde shooting, which claimed the lives of nineteen students and two teachers, or the 2023 Lewiston murders, where eighteen people were murdered. A new report by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I head, shows that much about what we believe about these attacks isn’t true.

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The numbers cited by Biden and CNN come from the Gun Violence Archive, broadly defines mass shootings to include any case with four or more people shot or injured. Some injuries are not from actually being shot.

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There is a reason that Uvalde or Lewiston get the news coverage that they do and you don’t hear about these other 600 cases. What makes these attacks newsworthy is that the shooter tries to kill as many people as possible in a public place. The FBI active shooting reports concentrate on shootings that occur in public and do not involve some other crime such as robbery. Traditionally, the FBI has classified “mass” as four or more people being murdered.

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The vast majority of the GVA numbers involve rival drug gang members. We hear about all the shootings in Chicago, but the individual attacks almost never get national coverage because they overwhelmingly involve drug gangs. Any type of murder is a tragedy, but the causes and solutions differ for drug gang fights and school shootings.

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Since 1998, there have never been more than eight mass shootings in a public place not involving another crime in a year. These are referred to as mass public shootings. The annual average has been 3.9 attacks and 33.1 murders. In 2023, there were seven attacks.

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California has the strictest gun control laws in the country, but its per capita annual rate of mass public shootings is much higher than in the rest of the country. Since 2000, California’s rate has been 0.33 per million, whereas the rest of the US has had a rate of 0.25 per million. Since 2010, California’s rate has been 0.28 per million versus 0.15 for the rest of the US. And since 2020, it has been 0.13 for California and 0.05 for the rest of the US. California’s rate is also consistently higher than that of Texas — a state that gun control advocates sometimes like to demonize.

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The media likes to give the impression that attacks with “assault rifles” are pervasive. In fact, seventeen percent of attacks involve just any type of rifle. Fifty-three percent of attacks involve only handguns.

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And who’s using the assault rifles? According to Biden, it’s white supremacists. “We’ve seen the mass shootings in Charleston, South Carolina; El Paso, Texas; in Pittsburgh; last year in Atlanta; this week in Dallas, Texas; and now in Buffalo — in Buffalo, New York. White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison. It really is. Running through our body politic. And it’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes. No more. I mean, no more.” But, based on the CPRC’s research, only seven percent of mass shootings were clearly motivated by racism.

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Biden overlooks the fact that the El Paso and Buffalo mass murders hated blacks because they were environmentalists and felt that blacks were causing overpopulation by having too many children.

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Whites are not disproportionately committing these attacks. While non-middle eastern whites make up 55.3% of the population, they comprise 54.9% of mass shooters and 55.1% of victims. Blacks make up 13.6% of the population, but 16.7% of the attackers and only 9.9% of victims. Middle Easterners, with a 4% share of the population, are overrepresented in shooters (6.9%) and underrepresented among victims (0.9%).

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Conflating Uvalde with armed robberies or fights over drug turf doesn’t make sense, but it does create inflated numbers that can be used to scare and mislead people. Mass public shootings are very rare, and it’s much rarer still for them to be committed by rifle-toting white supremacists.

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John R. Lott, Jr., “The Truth About Mass Shootings,” Real Clear Policy, January 13, 2023.