I read a fair number of studies that look at guns, gun control, gun rights, and so on. Most of them are terribly flawed, at best. I'd actually argue most of them are designed to sell gun control.
A recent one makes a ridiculous claim about how many people have been impacted by mass shootings, which is particularly bad.
The numbers suggested by this "study" would have you believe millions of people are impacted by horrific incidents like what we saw at Florida State University (FSU) last week, and it's infuriating a lot of people.
One of those is Andrew Pollack, who lost his daughter at Parkland:
My daughter, Meadow, was murdered in the Parkland school shooting. I’ve spent every day since trying to make sure no other parent has to endure what I did. That’s why I’m speaking out now — because the way we talk about mass shootings in this country is broken. The media keeps getting the facts wrong, and worse, they keep ignoring the real causes of these tragedies.
A recent headline from the University of Colorado boldly claims that 1 in 15 U.S. adults have “been at the scene of a mass shooting.” That means 18 million Americans have witnessed a mass shooting firsthand and 5.6 million “injured” — absurd claims that don’t pass the smell test. But unfortunately, these kinds of statistics are being repeated without question by people who want to push a narrative, not the truth.
The academic paper begins by defining a mass shooting as an incident where four or more people are shot, but it never actually asks respondents about that specific scenario. Instead, it asks whether they’ve ever been “physically present on the scene of a mass shooting in your lifetime,” without explaining what that means. Based on this vague framing, the survey could count someone who merely hears distant gunshots in a rough area as a “mass shooting survivor.”
That’s not research. It’s fear-mongering disguised as data.
As the Crime Prevention Research Center points out, even taking numbers put together by a gun control group the University of Colorado academics cite, shows that victims and criminals were wounded at a rate of at most 1.56% of the 5.6 million victims claimed in this study.
The truth is this: dangerous, threatening people commit mass shootings. Not law-abiding Americans. And almost every time, the killers give off warning signs long before they act. In the case of my daughter’s murderer, he was known to police, school officials, and even the FBI. He had a history of violence and made repeated threats. But no one acted.
The numbers really just don't pan out, but all of this is predicated on advancing gun control.
Yet, as Pollack notes above, the man who killed his daughter and others was known to the authorities. They had the opportunity to make an arrest way beforehand, and considering he was looking at domestic violence charges in some of those incidents, had they done so, he would have been prohibited from buying a gun. They did nothing, then anti-gun advocates started pretending there were no laws available that could have prevented it.
Pollack also notes that most mass shootings, at least as most people think of them, happen in gun-free zones.
But that whole "as most people think of them" is where there's a bigger problem.
For most of us, we think of mass shootings as something not unlike what happened at FSU or Parkland. Some maniac walks up and just starts shooting people for no reason.
Yet the definition used in the study includes gunfights between rival gangs or other kinds of violent crime that aren't what people think of as mass shootings, then lumps in the millions who claim to have been impacted by them as victims of some sort, and then try to present it as some kind of landmark research that proves we need gun control.
It's idiotic.
