CPRC in the New York Post: “The FBI’s bogus report on mass shootings”

Oct 12, 2014 | Featured

John Lott’s newest piece in the New York Post discusses our recent study and starts this way:

It’s disheartening to see the FBI used to promote a political agenda, but that’s what we got with the bureau’s release last month of a study claim to show a sharp rise in mass shootings, a la Newtown, Conn.
The FBI counted 160 “mass” or “active” shootings in public places from 2000 to 2013. Worse, it said these attacks rose from just one in 2000 to 17 in 2013. Media outlets worldwide gave the “news” extensive coverage.
Too bad the study is remarkably shoddy — slicing the evidence to distort the results. In fact, mass public shootings have only risen ever so slightly over the last four decades.
While the FBI study discusses “mass shootings or killings,” its graphs were filled with cases that had nothing to do with mass killings. Of the 160 cases it counted, 32 involved a gun being fired without anyone being killed. Another 35 cases involved a single murder. . . .

The piece continues here.
Our op-ed piece was highlighted at Real Clear Politics (click on screen shot to enlarge).
Screen Shot 2014-10-13 at  Monday, October 13, 4.39 PM 1

UPDATE: The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has an editorial discussing our op-ed in the New York Post:

Way off target for accuracy, an FBI report claiming a dramatic rise in mass shootings from 2000 to 2013 hits the political bull’s-eye for the gun-grabbing Obama administration.

John R. Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and author of “More Guns, Less Crime,” writes in the New York Post that this “remarkably shoddy” report, covering 160 cases and released last month, is “slicing the evidence to distort the results.” It counts as mass shootings 32 cases without fatalities and 35 involving single fatalities — which fit neither the FBI’s old definition of such incidents (four or more murders) nor its new definition (at least three).

The report starts with 2000, an unusually quiet mass-shootings year along with 2001, “padding the cases in later years with non-mass shooting attacks” to get desired results. Mr. Lott’s own updated research with a University of Chicago scholar shows only “a slight increase in deaths from mass public shootings” since 1977 that “depends largely on … 2012, when there were 91 deaths.” . . .

johnrlott

0 Comments

Archives