Science: Actually, Mass Shooting Incidents Aren't Going Up At All, If You Bother To Do the Actual Research

...as Science demands.

Mother Jones is pushing some more fake numbers at the public.

[A] recent article in Mother Jones asserted that we have "entered a new period in which mass shootings are occurring more frequently." This report relied on the well-known list compiled by Mother Jones, which has been one of the key sources used to support the claim made in the last few years that the incidences of mass shootings have accelerated.

Grant Duwe, a researcher with Minnesota's Department of Corrections, and author on mass murders in America, has already run the numbers -- and Mother Jones' numbers are simply wrong. Mother Jones seems to rely only on newspaper accounts of mass shootings, and therefore does not know about a large number of mass shootings which are documented in FBI files but are not easily discoverable through Lexis/Nexis searches of newspapers. And this problem gets worse the further back in time you go:

[T]he underreporting in the Mother Jones list grows more severe the further back in time we go. When looking at the data by decade, we see that the Mother Jones list captured 89 percent of the 18 cases from 2010-2013, 69 percent of the 29 cases from 2000-2009, 55 percent of the 42 cases from 1990-1999, and just 32 percent of the 25 cases from 1982-1989.

Hit the link to see Mother Jones' graph of some mass shootings, showing an upward trend; and then page down to see the author's graph of all mass shootings, showing no particular trend at all.

posted by Ace at 05:24 PM

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