The U.S. Has The Highest Rate Of Mass Shootings, Right? WRONG!

It is said every time there is a mass shooting.  It is accepted wisdom, never questioned even by conservative media outlets.  The U.S. has a much higher rate of mass shootings.  Pres. Obama's recent words are typical:

“But we are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency. It doesn’t happen in other advanced countries. It’s not even close. And as I’ve said before, somehow we’ve become numb to it and we start thinking that this is normal.” –President Obama, announcing his new executive orders on guns, January 7, 2016

That statement and all like it have been proven false - thanks to the excellent work of Dr. John Lott at the Crime Prevention Research Center.

It is true that there are more mass shootings here in the U.S. than in many other countries, but what has never been taken into account is that the U.S. has a much larger population than the other countries to which we are compared!  UNTIL NOW.

This is so basic it is unbelievable that no one has done this research before.  In any other field, including the field of medicine, what is important is the rate of whatever you are concerned about not the raw numbers.

It is not at all unexpected that the U.S. has more mass shootings than the European nations gun control advocates point to as shining examples of gun control success.  The US has massively a larger population than any of them.  Obviously, if the rate of mass shootings was identical, the U.S. would have many more shootings.  So the first step is to index for population.  Fail to do that and your figures are nothing but propaganda.

This is exactly what Dr. Lott has done for us - he has indexed the data for population.  Consider these two charts from his highly informative article:

(From article on the Center of Crime Prevention Research website)

Worried about being killed in a mass shooting?   Well, statistically, you would be safer staying home than moving to many nations gun control advocates point at as shining examples.  But what about the number of incidents?  Surely the U.S. has the highest rate of mass shooting incidents, right?  WRONG.

(From article on the Center of Crime Prevention Research website)

Comparing the number of mass shootings, the U.S. actually does even better.  Better than Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Belgium. Austria. the Czech Republic and France - all but one of which have much more restrictive gun laws than we have here.  In fact, the laws in these countries far exceed U.S. constitutional limits - and anything that Pres. Obama has proposed.   Yet, they have higher rates of mass shooting incidents per capita.

These are the facts.  Gun control has not stopped these countries from having many more mass shootings per person than we have.   We have more mass shootings because our population is much larger - not because we have "weak gun laws".  It's time that we stop letting that lie go unchallenged.

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