The Truth About Mass Shootings
By Nate Jackson · Dec. 4, 2015
Facts are stubborn things. In the wake of the Islamist attack in San Bernardino, Barack Obama trotted out the usual blame-the-gun rhetoric: “We have a pattern of mass shootings in this country with no parallel anywhere else in the world.” That was after he claimed in a Tuesday press conference (in Paris, of all places), “This just doesn’t happen in other countries.” Repeat, ad nauseum. But is it really true? This doesn’t happen in the Middle East, Africa and Asia? As you might guess whenever Obama opens his mouth, no, it’s not true. The U.S. is pretty much in the middle of the pack for mass murder committed with firearms, both in the frequency and death rate. In fact, according to gun researcher John Lott, “In just 2015, France suffered more casualties — killings and injuries — from mass public shootings than the U.S. has suffered during Obama’s entire presidency (508 to 424).”
As for the number of mass shooting incidents in the U.S., we’ve noted before that the Leftmedia uses completely BS statistics collected by anti-gun fanatics. How inflated are those numbers? The Mass Shooting Tracker website claims the San Bernardino attack was the 355th “mass shooting” this year, but its deliberately inflated definition includes, for example, non-fatal incidents with pellet guns and they count attackers in the number shot, dead or not. The Congressional Research Service, on the other hand, still defines “mass killing” widely — “three or more killings in a single incident” — and even then there were 317 mass shootings … from 1999 to 2013. That also doesn’t distinguish between a random public mass murder and a man killing his wife and in-laws. Overall, firearms-related homicides have dropped dramatically over the last two decades, all while gun ownership has greatly increased.
So what do Democrats do? Propose the same old “universal background checks” idea that would do nothing to stop the two San Bernardino terrorists — or most other deranged killers. They want to ban “assault rifles,” too, though California law is already especially strict on this. And there are reports that the couple modified at least one rifle in an attempt to make it fully automatic. Such modification is illegal in all states, but by all means let’s make it super illegal this time. Oh, and using any kind of firearm to murder people is illegal everywhere, too, but that doesn’t ever seem to stop murderous psychos.
Meanwhile, leftists go out of their way to shame those who pray for the victims. Tolerance, indeed, and facts be damned along the way.
