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90 Percent of All Stats Are Made Up on the Spot
This was originally meant to be a comment on @belt’s recent post but got way too long.
As a gun owner, it’s difficult to respond after a mass shooting. The loss is real and sickening and the emotion is deep; to try and make an argument that is not an emotion-filled plea to prevent this from happening in the futures seems callous and untimely. Maybe the best course of action for gun owners is to sit quietly like the friends of Job and mourn with the mourning. But it’s hard to stay quiet when the political left is out in force, making as much hay as they can. In a large sense, a gun owner is faced with the option to remain respectfully silent, or indecorously present heartless facts to a mourning nation.
I found this Washington Post presentation from late last week to be a pretty interesting interactive article. While it’s not the most biased article I’ve read on the subject, it’s pretty clear that this compilation of statistics is meant to prop up the folks in favor of limiting our Second Amendment Rights. Yet at the same time, using the statistics from this article that I would call “left-leaning, but trying hard to be fair” and putting them in a larger context gave me an interesting perspective. Here are the key points from the article:
There is no universally accepted definition of a public mass shooting, and this piece defines it narrowly. It looks at the 150 shootings in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (two shooters in a few cases). It does not include shootings tied to gang disputes or robberies that went awry, and it does not include shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers…
1,077 Killed. The people who were killed came from nearly every imaginable race, religion and socioeconomic background. Their ages range from the unborn to the elderly; 176 were children and teenagers. In addition, thousands of survivors were left with devastating injuries, shattered families and psychological scars…
292 Guns. Shooters often carried more than one weapon; one was found with 24. At least 167 of mass shooters’ weapons were obtained legally and 49 were obtained illegally. It’s unclear how 76 weapons were acquired.
153 Shooters. Some of these mass shooters were known to have violent tendencies or criminal pasts. Others seemed largely fine until they attacked. All but 3 were male. The vast majority were between the ages of 20 and 49. More than half — 88 of them — died at or near the scene of the shooting, often by killing themselves…
150 Shootings. In the 50 years before the Texas tower shooting, there were just 25 public mass shootings in which four or more people were killed, according to author and criminologist Grant Duwe. Since then, the number has risen dramatically, and many of the deadliest shootings have occurred within the past few years…
The contextual evidence I would provide is from this CNN.com article (I deliberately tried to find left-biased articles whose authors are attempting to be objective in order to try and fight my own personal confirmation bias on the subject). The biggest piece that I would take from this article is their argument that 21 percent of Americans are gun owners. Personally, I thought there was some nuance that this article glossed over in coming to that conclusion about gun ownership, but for the sake of context, I’ll grant their point.
These are the statistics I came up with using the foundation of these two articles, using their numbers and their conclusions:
- 150 events over 40.5 years. 150 really bad days out of 18,454 days, or 0.8 percent of days.
- 1,077 killed. If our current population is 323 million, then .00034 percent of our population has been killed by these events. (This is a flawed number because it takes the current population and compares it to an aggregate total of those killed over the last 40 years in these events. However, if I did the work to try and get this number more accurate by gathering population numbers over the last 40 years, it would only make the percentage number even smaller. Since that only strengthens my point, and I don’t have time to do that much work on this project, I’ll leave the numbers as they stand.)
- 157 perpetrators. If we take the CNN article’s numbers of gun owners, that gives us 67,980,000 gun owners in the US. This means that .00023 percent of gun owners commit these type of crimes. (This statistic has the same aggregation problems as the last one.)
- 292 guns. If there’s a gun for every American as the CNN article’s title holds, then .00009 percent of weapons in America are used for these crimes (same aggregation problems).
So it seems to me that those who would impose gun control based on mass-shooting statistics are attempting to restrict or revoke the rights of a minimum of 68 million people, or 21 percent of Americans, because of the actions of .00023 percent of their specific population (.000049 percent of the entire US population), who are using .00009 percent of the total firearms in the US to perform atrocities that statistically happen very infrequently. Now, I’m no statistician or much of student of these things in any way; all my calculations were done on my iPhone to see if I could verify a certain hunch.
These events break my heart and make me sick to my stomach. It disgusts me that we have to consider armed security for our schools. It angers me that members within my personal demographic of gun owners would do something like this and threaten the rights of those of us who own and use our weapons responsibly. There is an incredibly heavy emotional toll that these shootings take on our populace that can only be measured over time. Yet to this point, I think it has borne out that gun control legislation is hard to pass, even in blue states, and I think that the statistics presented above probably have something to do with it. I also believe that the left probably cares far less about “meaningful gun control” than they do about gaining an opportunity to appear morally superior to scary gun owners.
Thanks and please feel free to debate my numbers and points. I would be the last to call myself an expert and would love to test my theories against a real pro.
Published in Guns
Another statistic that you probably mentioned is the percentage of mass shootings executed with illegally obtained guns. Laws already on the books would have prevented those murders. More laws would probably yield zero better results…unless the government confiscates all guns…then there would probably be more mass shootings with contraband weapons.
< devil’s advocate mode = on >
Or, you could also call it, “one every 123 days”.
That’s three “really bad days” per year.
< devil’s advocate mode = off >
Great point about how phrasing affects the weight of statistics. Even though infrequent, three really bad days a year still sounds to my ear like way too many. But you did find the the weakest of the statistics I presented, especially considering that the frequency of these ‘mass shootings’ is increasing.
I have read that the frequency of incidents isn’t increasing, but that casualties-per-incident is increasing.
It’s a learning curve. Unfortunately, the good guys’ learning curve doesn’t appear to be as steep.
I think it is time to start throwing it back into the teeth of the other side. The statistics are pretty clear, guns are not the problem. On the other hand, I think that the unrealistic quasi-religious sentiments of the people who insist that guns are the problem, are the problem. They are inhibiting the good guys’ learning curve by shouting down anything that doesn’t fit their unrealistic model of the way things ought to be.
Unborn? UNBORN? These people are quite happy to kill myriad unborn every day and deny it’s murder – until it supports their argument against guns, and then just one is too many!
Logic and reason finds no place with these people.
I’m told that lies are 85% more believable when phrased as statistics.
I thought so. Now I have a source for the statistic. Awesome!
Isn’t it interesting how unborn children seem to have enough of a life to be be counted in shooting statistics, but not enough of a life to be counted as defensible against abortion?
Just so they serve a useful purpose.
It’s also possible that the youth led “grassroots” marches are Soros funded astroturf.
That would add another layer of complexity to the troubling questions posed by @stuarthawkes-2.
150 events over 40.5 years resulted in 1077 deaths. Painful yes, but if we are trying to save lives this is not the best place to focus.
According to the CPSC 2016 Annual Report on ATV Related Deaths and Injuries:
Source : https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/atv_annual_Report_2016_0.pdf?ntwycn8wu3ITrXLnLC49kn_lxxDASq5e
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address the problem of mass shootings, but it is puzzling that we don’t pay any attention to bigger problems.
Perhaps not so puzzling. Those deaths happen in small groups – one or two. Also they are common and because they are common we accept them as individual tragedies.
Maybe also because certain parties can’t use news of them to eliminate the 2nd amendment.
Chris Plante is breaking down the heavily orchestrated propaganda, this morning. Wow.
This part irks me and I have responded to it before. They do not get to use and abuse others’ grief to make unchallenged political assertions without response.
I think that they need to be told to stop politicizing a tragedy. If they want a political debate than they need to stop shaming their opponents from hitting back.
The city of Chicago is a “gun free zone.” Most years, it also comes in as being the Capital City of Murder.
Of course, what police force is going to go into neighborhoods where there are far too many scumbag gang members, all of whom have guns locked and loaded?
So I would say that your comment is spot on.