The numbers undercut myths about mass shootings and White...

Post Reply New Topic

Shortly after news broke of the mass shooting underway in Boulder, Colorado, a familiar sequence began playing out on social media: condemning the White male entitlement assumed to fuel the majority of such attacks.

"Extremely tired of people's lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a bad day," tweeted Julie DiCaro of Deadspin.

"It's always an angry white man. Always," wrote Hemal Jhaveri of USA Today. USA Today fired Jhaveri for this.

When the alleged perpetrator was apprehended, crime fiction author Don Winslow offered a mordant epigram: "Description: 'Police have taken him into custody'. Translation: He was white."

(...)

One could argue that it's an understandable mistake, as Meena Harris, the vice president's niece, suggested: "I made an assumption based on his being taken into custody alive and the fact that the majority of mass shootings in the U.S. are carried out by white men." Harris is right about one thing: If you just predict that every mass shooter will be a White man, statistically you'll be right more often than not -- like calling coin flips on a rigged coin.

(...)

James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, maintains a database in collaboration with USA Today and the Associated Press that covers all mass shootings in the United States since 2006. When I asked him to analyze the data around incidents such as the Boulder massacre, he confirmed that about 55% of perpetrators in such incidents had been reported as White. (In some cases, race was unreported).Using a different dataset that ran from 1976 to 2019, with more inclusive criteria for inferring race, Fox found that some 64% of shooters were White.

But this commits a common statistical fallacy -- thinking that if most mass shooters were White, that means that White people must be particularly likely to commit mass shootings. That doesn't follow. Most Americans are White, so the majority of people doing almost anything will be White if there's no racial discrepancy.

Let's dig a little deeper in the numbers. Most mass shootings are committed by adult men, and census data shows that about 67% of adult men in the United States are non-Hispanic Whites. So it appears that the number of White men committing these crimes is close to what we'd expect from pure chance, maybe even slightly lower -- the opposite of what we'd see if white supremacy culture were at fault.

(...)

In short, there are indeed subtle racial angles to mass shootings that we might profitably explore. But this particular narrative, which is unfortunately the dominant one, is an analytical dead end. It's also a harmful racial stereotype for which there is no good evidence.

We won't advance the cause of racial justice by propagating false stereotypes about any group -- even the majority. And we certainly won't make much progress on mass shootings if we wrongly convince ourselves that an all-too-common national failing, afflicting Americans of all colors and creeds, is mostly the peculiar pathology of a single privileged class.

Post talks about "digging deeper" into the numbers, but completely ignores the fact that the "study" being waved and touted is based on criteria that massively underestimate the number of mass shootings at around 140 since 1982, as opposed to other counts that put it closer to 450.

The "study" being used here completely ignores a mass shooting (4 or more people killed) if it took place in a residence, as though a mass shooting isn't a mass shooting just cos it happened in a house instead of a spa or a nightclub.

Picking data to "prove" your narrative is an old trick. Custom-tailored data, to suit all your propaganda needs!

I'd love to answer your question, but, you can't seem to decide what you're talking about. First you mention mass shootings. Now you're talking about homicide in general. Those are two different categories for aggregating data. Which was my point to begin with. You will get a different number of "mass shooting" depending on how you define "mass shootings".

I've been getting my data from the FBI and the DOJ. I look at the RAW data, not the charts compiled by other people, BASED on FBI data. The FBI and DOJ consider a mass shooting to consist of 4 or more people. By that count, over 400, close to 450.

YOUR article took the FBI data, and the article themselves narrowed it even further, to arbitrarily count ONLY mass shootings that occurred in public places, and ignores mass shootings that took place on private property. A mass shooting is a mass shooting, regardless of where it happens - in a mall or in a home, 4 people or more. By leaving out mass shootings that happen in homes, they've skewed the data, since they ARE mass shootings, they've just decided for some reason that THOSE mass shootings "don't count". The FBI didn't make that differentiation, the news source did.

It's sort of like if I did a poll to see how many autistic people have trouble with light sensitivity, and then explicitly seek out autistic people with no light sensitivity. Then I can claim that "100% of those surveyed had no issues with light sensitivity!" Which is factually true, but realistically meaningless.

As for racial stereotypes, it really feels like the only people being protected from "evil stereotypes" in this instance, are white people...