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Obama earns two Pinocchios from the Washington Post's fact checkers on his statement after the Oregon shooting. They do a good job of separating murder vs. suicide, but I would have liked to have seen them actually break out mass shootings, as that is the topic at hand.
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JakeLonergan 9 years, 1 month ago
Well, we just learned shooting tracker.com will actually stoop to using pellet gun shootings to inflate the Mass Shootings category. No doubt "the News" (Say it the way Charlie Mackenzie said it in So I Married An Axe Murderer.) will be quoting them soon. To get better numbers you might go to John Lott's crimeresearch.org.
More to the point of the headline, I recently read that gun control heaven CA leads the USA in shootings but can't find the citing right now. I'd have to guess equally heavenly Chicago brings the entire state of Illinois up to second in the nation.
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elsueco 9 years, 1 month ago
I would not be surprised to hear that shootingtracker.com is including pellet guns in the statistics.
One think I executive order Obama can/should act on is to set an official definition of "mass shooting". Without one, the numbers can be whatever someone wants them to be.
I've been finding references to a "mass shooting" as being 4 or more people killed, I believe attributed to an FBI report. Shooting Tracker and other anti's like to claim that there's a mass shooting every day in the US. However, looking at their list of shootings, they only (thankfully) have 32 incidents on their list for 2015 where 4+ people were killed.
I sorted their list by number killed. At the top of the list is the UCC shooting, listing 10 dead. So, they're including the murderer in their list of casualties. I don't believe the murderer should be included in a list of victims, and b) oftentimes, the murderer dies by way of suicide which shouldn't be included on a list of mass shootings. Thus, I would suspect that many of the 19 cases of 4 dead on their list would drop off once the murderer was removed from the total.
The second thing that immediately stands out is the item with the second most number of deaths in 2015: 9 dead in the Waco, TX biker gang shooting. Again, a lack of a definition becomes important here. This was a gang incident with multiple shooters, not the typical "lone wolf" that one normally thinks of with a mass shooting.
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elsueco 9 years, 1 month ago
Mother Jones detailed their methodology in 2012, and referenced a 2005 FBI report which defines a mass shooting as being four people killed OTHER than the murderer. They also exclude gang violence. At the time, they tallied 62 incidents of mass shootings over the past 30 years.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/08/what-is-a-mass-shooting">http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/08/what-is-a-mass-shooting
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elsueco 9 years, 1 month ago
In regards to which areas have the most murder, I found this list of the top 30 US cities for murder with a population over 10k. CA cities are not even in the top-5:
http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/top-lists/highest-murder-rate-cities/">http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/top-lists/highest-murder-rate-cities/
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JakeLonergan 9 years, 1 month ago
Ok...murders per 1,000. I can see that while the aggregate of some of the smaller locales might not be very high while the "per 1k" could be spectacular. I can easily see where the total for a huge population area would be very high while the per 1k remains low. But whatever. Oh, and B-HO doesn't want reality in the emotional pleas he makes.
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elsueco 9 years, 1 month ago
Here are some totals from 2012:
http://mic.com/articles/64279/the-15-most-murderous-cities-in-the-united-states">http://mic.com/articles/64279/the-15-most-murderous-cities-in-the-united-states
And for 2014:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/03/america-s-2014-murder-capital.html">http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/03/america-s-2014-murder-capital.html
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