Why Can’t Anyone Agree How Many Mass Shootings There Have Been in 2013?
21st September 2013
I mean … damn, people, take your shoes off if you need to….
If you’ve been following the news in the wake of the Washington Navy Yard massacre, you might be hopelessly confused about how frequently mass shootings happen in the United States. The Huffington Post reports that there have been at least 16 mass shootings this year so far, killing a total of 78 people. Mother Jones, on the other hand, has updated its much-cited “Guide to Mass Shootings” with the news that the Navy Yard murders were “the fifth mass shooting in the United States this year.” An article by Annie Linsky at Bloomberg doesn’t offer a count for 2013, but it does stress how rare such crimes are. That Huffington Post piece, by contrast, talks about how “common” mass shootings have “become.”
As you might have guessed, different reporters are using different definitions of “mass shooting.” We’ve waded through this thicket of competing numbers before, and if you want to get into the statistical weeds I can point you to a couple of posts I wrote last year, “Are Mass Shootings Becoming More Common in the United States?” and “Making Sense of Mass-Shooting Statistics.” Here’s the key points to remember as you read the numbers floating around in the press:
And, as you may have noticed, all of these counts take place in the-sky-is-falling regressive publications, who don’t really give a shit how many people get shot in ‘mass shootings’ (or they’d have something to say about the ‘mass shootings’ that take place every week in Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles and ….) except insofar as it provides a stepping stone to enacting more ineffective ‘gun control’ laws. It’s all about the narrative.