Not to sound cynical about big media – good heavens no, not me – but when I see the New York Times reporting on active shooters, I pretty much expect their “reporting” to either lie, or to hide the accurate conclusion in plain sight.
And they’ve done that.
They include a snazzy, Edward Tufte-style graphic to explicate their case – and they reached this conclusion:
“It’s direct, indisputable, empirical evidence that this kind of common claim that ‘the only thing that stops a bad guy with the gun is a good guy with the gun’ is wrong,” said Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama, who has studied mass shootings for more than a decade. “It’s demonstrably false, because often they are stopping themselves.”
So let’s look at the graphic:
So let’s take a look at the numbers.Out of nearly 250 mass shootings that ended before the police arrived, nearly 10% ended with the assailant being shot by a “bystander“ – A “good guy with a gun“. That’s nearly 10% of spree shootings, ended before the cops arrive
(That is, of course, presuming the media actually recognizes the episode. For example, they studiously ignored this recent incident .Even so, that is actually a tad higher than I’d have figured; given that spree killers tend to pick targets where nobody is likely to be able to resist them, and nowhere near 10% of the population at large generally carries a firearm, that’s actually a better result than one might rationally expect.
But now, let’s look at the other resolutions.
Of the 249 mass shootings that ended before the cops arrived, nearly 80% end with the killer either leaving the scene or committing suicide.
And the devil with these shootings is in the details. Some of the spree killers do leave the scenes of their crimes on their own two feet. But others “leave” because a citizen threatened them with immediate death – as in this case four years ago, where two good guys with guns changed a would-be racist spree killer’s plans, one with the threat of death, one with gunfire, causing him to run away. He was apprehended later.
One that killed himself, did it after killing two people – before a good guy pointed a gun at his head. He ran into a nearby store, and killed himself.
Or this case, where a church “security guard” (a volunteer with a carry permit) shot a spree killer who’d murdered four people already. He killed himself, it’s true – after his plan had been fatally derailed by a good gal with a gun.
So what’s my conclusion?
You can tell Big Media is lying about guns when their lips are moving, or their fingers are touching keyboards.
Same as it ever was.
That conclusion, the one quoted from the NY Times article, is really lame. I mean, it’s so lame it needed an academic expert who’s supposedly studied the subject for more than a decade (and that’s a really long time) to demolish – utterly destroy! – a superficial rhetorical argument.
The fact is that 45% of the time either some bystander or a police officer (a proxy bystander) directly disposed of the problem. And 25% of all cases involved a suicide. And what comprises that “left the scene” group? It’s 45% of the before the police arrive and 25% of all total cases. Why did the culprit leave? Bystanders?
Why did the culprit leave? – he got the munchies?
And — you knew it was coming — the editorial in a liberal paper claiming that Americans enjoy “unfettered” gun rights: https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2022/06/25/opinion/forget-history-forget-safety-the-supreme-court-prizes-unfettered-gun-rights-above-all-else/
The author is none other than Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of UCB School of Law & one time foil of Hugh Hewitt on Hewitt’s radio program.
I thought he was an idiot when I heard him on Hewitt. He tended to elide facts when they didn’t suit him and magnify their importance when they did suit him. Chemerinsky treated highly controversial legal and constitutional issues as though no one had any opinion on them that differed from his own.
This op-ed is not different. Speaking of the NY law overturned by the SC this week, Chemerinsky says “Getting such a license requires, among other things, showing that having a concealed weapon is necessary because the person or a family member is in danger.”
Nope. You had to show that you were in special danger, that you experienced more danger than anyone else in your position. If you are a woman who lives in a neighborhood where other women have been frequently attacked, well, you are in no more danger than any other woman in similar circumstances, so no gun for you.
Chemerinsky also plays loose with the facts (this used to bother me when I heard him on Hewitt’s program. Hewitt rarely corrected Chemerinsky).
For example, Chemerinsky writes “From 1791 until 2008, the Supreme Court never once declared unconstitutional any law — federal, state, or local — as violating the 2nd Amendment.”
In reality, gun control laws in the US are a 20th century phenomenon. Chemerinsky doesn’t mention it (of course!), but so-called “gun control” laws of the 19th century were prohibitions on selling guns to freed blacks and Indians.
And this is just weird: “For other constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech or the right to privacy, a government action is constitutional if it is shown to be necessary to achieve a compelling purpose.”
The word “privacy” does not appear in the constitution. We protect privacy with laws.
And when is the last time you had to apply to a government official to say or print something?
As much as I’d like to agree, statistics are tricky things. Let’s start by remembering the FBI’s definition of “mass shooting” as 4 people killed in one event, not including the shooter and assume that the NYT is applying that definition (always a chancy thing with the NYT).
Let’s assume that we’ve got a random assortment of people. Assume 2% of people in that population carry a gun. That’s 98% who don’t. Now, let’s assume there are 5 people at the shooting, not including the shooter. The odds that nobody has a gun are 1-(.98*.98*.98*.98*.98)=9.6%. Drop those odds of carrying to 1% and there’s still a 9% chance of armed resistance with 10 folks involved.
Obviously, I had some bias in choosing those numbers to come up with that 10% number, but what I really wanted to show that statistics are tricky things, and improbable events occur more often than you might expect. In this case, we’re assuming fully random events, but most mass shootings occur in situations where both the targets and the shooter(s) tend to be much more likely to carry guns due to their involvement in crime. It’s the truly horrific cases where crazies go to no-gun environments (movie theatres, schools, etc) where folks who might have been able to make a difference are disarmed by law that are disturbing. And don’t get me going on trying to depend on police; there’s a school in Texas of all places that proves how smart that is.