Trends In Mass Shootings

The trend will be your friend if you are the NRA, Hollywood,or video game manufacturers trying to deflect blame for rising gun violence in America. Per mass killing expert Alan Fox, there is no particular evidence suggesting we are in the grip of a rising wave of mass shootings. A Mother Jones team has put together their own database of mass shootings since 1980 (timeline) and their chart suggests a similar conclusion.

And for the factually oriented, this paper by criminologist Duwe from 2006 (hat tip to Jesse Walker of Reason) is fascinating. The media loves a narrative, which is why we read and talk about gun killings and exclude mass killings that used fire or bombs. Also, crimes involving strangers in public places are much more dramatic than banger-on-banger shoot-outs (e.g., the St. Valentine's Day massacre) or one monster wiping out the rest of his family, so they draw more coverage.

To be fair, the psychology of that is clear, but let me belabor the obvious: most of us have a pretty good idea as to whether we are involved with violent criminals or are in a potentially violent and abusive relationship so the idea of getting randomly gunned down in a movie theatre or a restaurant or having the kids shot in school is more personally problematic, and hence more "newsworthy".

Well - this background is interesting but I don't think actual facts will have much of a role to play in Obama's upcoming "conversation", in which we are all supposed to show fresh thinking if we are conservatives. Let me quote him from his press conference:

Over these past five days, a discussion has reemerged as to what we might do not only to deter mass shootings in the future, but to reduce the epidemic of gun violence that plagues this country every single day.  And it’s encouraging that people of all different backgrounds and beliefs and political persuasions have been willing to challenge some old assumptions and change longstanding positions.  

I doubt whether Obama's final proposals will challenge any assumption he has held over the last twenty years. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, as an example of the fact-free analysis I anticipate from the emotionally based community, this Times guest piece is a laugh riot in which a French professor ruminates about the rising tide of massacres:

Adam Lanza was a young man. Jacob Roberts was a young man. James Holmes is a young man. Seung-Hui Cho was a young man. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were young men.

And a bit later:

Does the heroic young man still make sense today, or has his value already been depleted?

...

There is also the issue of race. Not all of the men I listed in the beginning of this piece are Caucasian. However, take a moment and imagine what the archetypical image of a mass murderer in the United States looks like. Is he white in your mind? This image can only be attributed to the truth of those patterns that have established themselves,

Duwe from 2006 touched on that point - the media does favor a certain narrative:

But as Table 1 shows, the heavily publicized typifying examples used by claimsmakers are hardly representative of mass murder. Indeed, compared to mass killings in general, the 56 cases used as typifying examples were more likely to involve larger body counts, stranger victims, public locations, assault weapon use, workplace violence, interracial victim-offender relationships, older, suicidal offenders, and slightly more likely to involve gun use and white offenders.

I don't want to leap to conclusions but it is possible that the NY Times and other big media are more comfortable with stories involving white shooters (normally the Times avoids reporting the race of an alleged criminal). The Mother Jones team provides an example of this liberal mindset in action as they describe their database of 62 incidents:

Forty four of the killers were white males. Only one of them was a woman. 

Sixty-two incidents involving sixty-four killers (Columbine and Westside Middle School involved partners) are in the database. That means there are nineteen non-white male killers. And what is the racial breakdown?  Apparently the authors know, and the answer may be available at the website but it is eluding me. They do have pictures of some of the killers, and I see an American Indian (Jeffrey Weise) and more Asians than one would expect from normal crime statistics.

Still, whites represent about two-thirds of the killers despite being more than two-thirds of the population, so some other ethnic groups are over-represented. Yet the authors are not making the breakdown easily available. Hmm...

Are these young men? More Mother Jones:

The average age of the killers was 35...

And where do the killings take place?

Half of the cases involved school or workplace shootings (12 and 19, respectively); the other 31 cases took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, government buildings, and military bases. 

Well, the French professor has a fascinating theory about a zero-sum world in which the empowerment of blacks and women has left young white men dispossessed, enraged, and prove to violence. That may not jibe with the trendless nature of mass shootings, the white under-representation among the shooters or the generally declining crime rate over the last twenty years, but hey - she has a piece in the Times and I don't, so go figure.

EERIE: Aurora, Colorado is the site of the Columbine killings (strictly speaking, Littleton is close by), the movie theatre shooting of 2012 and the Chuck E. Cheese killings of 1993 (that is on the timeline but not the interactive map). The Chuck E Cheese incident was a workplace killing with four dead; the shooter is on death row and does not fit the racial profile favored by the Times contributor. But geez, Aurora is not even that big a town and it has 5% of all the mass shootings in America over the last thirty years.

I DON'T LIKE MONDAYS... Readers of a certain age are remembering these pop lyrics:

The silicon chip inside her head

Gets switched to overload.

And nobody's gonna go to school today,

She's going to make them stay at home.

Wasn't that a school shooting? And wasn't "she" well, female? What gives?

Ah, well - that was a school shooting from 1979, which is outside the Mother Jones time frame. In addition, although eight students and a police officer were wounded, only two people were killed, so this was not a horrific mass shooting per the Mother Jones criteria.

Comments

[NK]

Obama's "discussion"... my ass... it will the 2 Minute Hate. several times per day, every day.

[narciso]

And what is her particular insight into the matter;

http://www.princeton.edu/fit/people/display_person.xml?netid=cwampole

[narciso]

Yes, she has a solid grasp on reality;

http://princeton.academia.edu/ChristyWampole

[MarkO]

I feel certain that with properly crafted Federal legislation we can put an end to random evil.

Next up? Random stupidity.

[NK]

The "French professor" is a woman from Texas (originally) who is a professor of French at Princeton. She and the NYT are waaaay beyond parody at this point. They simply disgust me. They are racialists, and fascists and misanthrops.

[Rob Crawford]

A country where most of the population has pale skin discovers that most of those suffering psychotic breaks have pale skin.

And still, Chicago's gun control laws produce a Newtown's worth of corpses every five weeks. Granted, they are not all children, but the VOLUME should inspire horror.

[narciso]

It's about the same level of insight one got from the late Molly Ivins, who was Sister school
and Sorbonne educated, don't know if she does the twang as well.

[NK]

RobC-- what is infuriating about the Left is that they look at the regular unending body count in ChiTown, and shrug their shoulders-- when effective responses to that gun violence have been proven for 18 years in NYC and elsewhere. Stop and Frisk where the street violence guns are. The Left gets the vapors and attacks that effective public safety measure as 'rascist' and 'anti civil liberty'. And when the infrequent mass murderer strikes the same Leftists scream "Whitey did it" and "take all the lawful guns away from the law abiding", constitutional rights be damned. Madness.

[rse]

Columbine is in Littleton, Colorado. Close but not Aurora. Aurora is where the behavioral ed lab that so aggressively pushed Transformational Outcomes Based Education is located. Columbine was one of the pilots.

McREL as the ed lab is called-short for Mid-continental Regional education laboratory pushes the behavioral sciences to change students from the inside-out by changing their perceptions and values and attitudes and beliefs. McREL is currently aggressively pushing what it calls Second Order Changes in Students.

That would be changes in consciousness to change behaviors to change society in a transformational way. Hard to believe there could be dangerous effects of such intrusions on malleable minds.

After all the documents keep mentioning 15 as the magic cut-off when the Prefrontal Cortex is less subject to manipulation.

There were good reasons I was so upset when I heard there had been a shooting in Aurora. No one slowed down in the least after Columbine. They just renamed what they were doing.

[Jane: Mock the Media]

I read somewhere this week that there have been 400 school shootings in Chicago this year. That's a city not a state and none of them have been reported by the racist NY Times.

[Jane: Mock the Media]

Jimmy,

If you are still down under will you let us know if the world has ended, because it is tomorrow there.

[NK]

jane- overnight I received an email from Japan, dated friday morning Tokyo time-- I think we're good.

[NK]

woops-- my mistake it was dated thursday afternoon Tokyo..

[hit and run]

Yes, Littleton and Aurora are opposite sides of South Denver. We lived in Littleton at the time of the Columbine shootings.

[Jimmyk]

Back stateside, Jane, so I can't reassure you. But check Tim Blair's site. If he's still up, we're good for another day.

[narciso]

This sort of fits the theme of the thread;

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/12/19/the_mess_we_left_behind_in_Libya

[rse]

Tom--

Hope you read this because here's the description from the now infamous Bill Spady himself written before Columbine in a book called Paradigm Lost,/i> lamenting the OBE controversy derailing his vision. Unfortunately that did not turn out to be true.

Listen up NC and Maine as well. Page 28:

"The good news is that by the early 90s, thousands of educators and policymakers had been introduced to the future-focused, life-performance approach to outcome defining and systemic change. Districts that had taken the lead with what we call "Strategic Design"--Aurora, Colorado; Mooresville, North Carolina; and Yarmouth, Maine, being clear examples--became the focal point of considerable national interest because educators could immediately see that their strategic curriculum planning had transcended the serious constraints of the Educentric Iceberg paradigm. These outcomes were addressing the whole person and equipping their students with complex competencies and role-performance abilities needed for a successful future"

The role performance aspiration never has turned out well anywhere I have encountered it.

[rse]

oops on italics

Did that work?

[Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki]

Nope

[bgates]

There were good reasons I was so upset when I heard there had been a shooting in Aurora.

Are there good reasons to continue to suggest a connection between that ed lab and the shooting given the Aurora shooter grew up in California?

[narciso]

Because bgates, Aurora was a node, of this behavior, and when he joined the graduate department in paychology, he rejoined the collective, the Borg if you will,

[narciso]

Just one step removed from this;

http://www.therightscoop.com/emboldened-palestinians-dont-want-netanyahu-and-threaten-more-pressure-on-israel-if-reelected/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRightScoop+%28The+Right+Scoop%29

[Jim Eagle]

I'm surprised at the seemingly lack of study regarding mass murder and/or school shooting. It would seem to me that with today's computational powers, historical data and profiling techniques we could better determining areas at risk and best practice security measures.

Its a hellva lot better to do this than hand-wringing, knee jerking and just banning every thing.

Mel, be safe, be warm, be drinking but no driving:)

[Melinda Romanoff]

The train is my friend. henry and Gus have bigger problems than me. Just face-blasting rain here.

(Just got back from lunch with YL, btw)

[narciso]

Well that would play havoc with the 'narrative' and we can't have that, JiB, a corrective to that Mother Jones report;

http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2012-12-19.html

[rse]

bgates-Holmes high school is San Diego was created new to pilot a new model of education that mirrors what was being pushed in CO and all the other factors of what would be cutting edge. It started in 2002 the year he started high school there and I have an accreditation report from year he graduated on just how out there it was.

Then the Pres of the UC he attended bragged about how cutting edge they were in terms of pushing a new version of OBE coupled with descriptions of the precise nature of that particular Neuroscience degree program.

And then he reentered the borg in CO.

Lots in other words.

[rse]

Doorbell rang. The SD school was again in the upper middle spectrum, high achieving neighborhood, and had eliminated subjects for the most part. Teaching "humanities," communication and a unified science, social and natural. A tech, vocational focus I think was the other. Also had the safe school climate these are the behavioral attitudes and dispositions we want all students to demonstrate they embody. It reminded me a lot of what the IB Learner Profile pushes but it was not an IB school.

No grades so much as demonstrating competencies and skills.

[rse]

The UC Pres said they were a national model and the most aggressive in UC system in shifting to a learner outcome focus.

And the Neuroscience made a big deal over all the social sciences that were part of the program to marry with the natural.

[narciso]

Well one thinks of that Chayevsky film, Altered States, the opposite of reason and content, is emotion and instinct, that was where William Hurt's character, basically rewired himself some would say devolved,

[Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki]

Didn't the guy in Aurora shoot all those people cause he was a damned nut?

[rse]

Absolutely Ignatz. But there are common factors in the school experiences of these young men who turn into damned nuts and take it out on innocents by shooting them.

Ignoring that seems dangerous. Ignoring it at the same time those common factors are being mandated nationally is downright foolhardy.

If the common factors have an effect and since their purpose in the intentions of their creators was psychological manipulation, that's not a big stretch, these tragedies could well increase in a few years.

[Melinda Romanoff]

rse-

It makes sense that the more maturely developed lobes would resist, or break with manipulation. Higher synapse count would also factor in to an inability to adapt to the manipulation.

Pretty sick stuff to achieve the long march, but also explains the death of Russian society due to the lower classes inability to adapt away from their training, while a selectively, educated few pillage the spoils.

[Neo]

Half of the cases involved school or workplace shootings (12 and 19, respectively); the other 31 cases took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, government buildings, and military bases.

I wonder why they left off liquor stores and banks

[sbw]

rse, McRel "was founded to turn knowledge about what works in education into practical guidance for educators"

They never say what the goal of their education is.

[Treeofmamre.wordpress.com]

To draw conclusions about mass killings one would also have to look at ones that occurred overseas. Yet, the usual suspects in the MSM and on the left ignore cases involving knives, explosives, and poisons, perpetrated by Asians and Africans, as it simply does not fit their narrative. It seems that in the whole world, only young white males with guns are to blame for these kinds of incidents.

[Landru]

And how many of the firearm homicdes in 2011 involved a rifle, of any kind? 353. 4% of the total. So the murder rate using a rifle is about .1/100k. To make that easier, we'll just call it one in a million.
So they want to ban something that is involved in, at most (assuming all the rifles are semi-auto's which probably is not the case), the death of one in a million people every year.

And the overall firearm homicide rates among the 219 million whites and Asians is about 1.4/100k. (CDC Mortality-fatal injury database). Some of these are justified homicides, so let's make that number easy. About 12 per million per year. One in a million per month. I don't think there are any epidimiologists who would describe 1 per million per month as an "epidemic".

[PapayaSF]

However, take a moment and imagine what the archetypical image of a mass murderer in the United States looks like. Is he white in your mind? This image can only be attributed to the truth of those patterns that have established themselves

How clueless does the writer (and the Times' editors) have to be to let that through? Imagine the archetypal mugger or burglar or rapist. I guess the race you imagine must be due to the "truth of those patterns," huh? Fascinating that the Times is now approving of racial stereotyping.

[Patriot4Freedom]

Time for some words of enduring wisdom that *should* be obvious to everyone - even the gun control acolytes of the left.
Courtesy of Pres. Reagan . . .

[SDN]

Tom, it isn't that there aren't non-white spree killers; we see their handiwork daily.

We just tend to see it under the headline "10 killed at party drive-by; might be gang-related" and the race is carefully omitted.

[MarkoNW]

http://twitter.com/markoNW/status/282213545196797953/photo/1
Venn for those opposed to violence against children...