Lankford’s study reported that from 1966 to 2012, there were 90 public
mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. We find that Lankford’s data represent a gross undercount of foreign attacks.
Our list contains 1,448 attacks and at least 3,081 shooters outside the
United States over just the last 15 years of the period that Lankford
examined. We find at least fifteen times more mass public shooters than
Lankford in less than a third the number of years.
Even when we use coding choices that are most charitable to Lankford,
his 31 percent estimate of the US’s share of world mass public shooters
is cut by over 95 percent. By our count, the US makes up less than
1.43% of the mass public shooters, 2.11% of their murders, and 2.88% of
their attacks. All these are much less than the US’s 4.6% share of the
world population. Attacks in the US are not only less frequent than in
other countries, they are also much less deadly on average.
1 comment:
And that's without considering the mass murders by other means than guns. All you need to kill a dozen people in a crowd is a powerful automobile, and it has happened several times in France and England in the last decade, but although Americans also have more cars and bigger cars than the rest of the world, I can only remember one or two incidents of deliberately driving into a crowd at high speed in the US in the last decade (or ever?). One was the guy that drove into a crowd of violent protesters, and it's not clear whether he was out to kill, or just trying to get away. Another was in Kalamazoo a few years ago, when a drunk/drugged/crazed driver finished up a high-speed drive in which he bounced his small truck off many items near the roads by swerving onto the shoulder and somehow holding his truck steady for long enough to run over an entire bicycle club - 4 dead and 5 seriously injured, IIRC. No one even knows if that second one was deliberate, and I don't know how many people other than Michigan bicyclists have even heard of it...
Bombings were fairly common in the US in the 1970's, but most of those were intended to do property damage only - not that their planning and execution weren't often flawed, but I got the impression that just about as many drug-addled hippies and "revolutionaries" died from their own bombs as they killed. Since then, only one or two bombings a decade have been in the news in the USA. In Europe, it's been several a year recently, and it's even worse in Muslim countries. Granted, some of our bombers were overachievers, so our death toll just from the Oklahoma City Federal Building might exceed dozens of bombers around the world all added together.
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