We are verifying a variety of accusations about guns and gun violence in the United States.
In March 2018, two conservative activists and satirists, Austen Fletcher (also known as Fleccas) and MAGA Midge, collaborated on a viral video about gun violence, in which the actors gave the impression of responding with surprise to a series of gun-related events. they were asked to do so. read from a teleprompter. In the video, MAGA Midge informs the actors that “we’re going to make you read from the teleprompter, those are genuine facts, they’re all real and well-documented facts about gun control.”
The video has been viewed millions of times online. You can read the first component here and you can watch the video below:
The claim is research by gun rights economist John Lott and his nonprofit group, the Crime Prevention Research Center.
As we have noted above, the way in which a “mass shooting” is explained is with the statistics used in such analysis. In this case, Lott used the FBI definition until 2013, which included “mass shootings” as incidents in which 4 or more other people (without adding the attacker) were shot dead in a public position for reasons unrelated to gang conflict. or armed robbery.
Lott’s investigation into mass shootings from 1950 to 1997 is messy, to say the least. It consists of an educational examination of the general correlation between the restrictive nature of gun law and the prevalence of mass-fired deaths between 1977 and 1997, rather than an assessment of gun regulations at the site of each individual incident.
It is not transparent where the evidence is from 1950 to 1976. Lott directed us to a list of mass shootings of the era in question that was part of a New York Times investigation in 2000, but did not come with any breakdown of the major regulations. about the ownership and use of firearms at the time and place of each incident. Without this information, no conclusions can be drawn on the prevalence of “gun-free zones” in mass shootings between 1950 and 1976.
Given this lack of detail, we will move to the era since 1998, for which Lott provided the main points on a case-by-case basis.
Their investigation concluded that 59 of the 64 mass shootings (92.2%) between 1998 and 2018 they took position in a “no-firearm zone,” public places where, more or less speaking, it is not legal for civilians to bring authorized firearms.
We reproduce Lott’s analysis, applying Lott’s stipulation that a gun-free zone is one in which civilians are sometimes not legally allowed to bring weapons, despite their rather dubious logic. The broader argument opposing gun-free zones is that homeowners with trained and guilty weapons can prevent massive shootings, and, according to Lott’s definition, a public outpost would be designated as a “weapons-free zone” even if the army or army is legally trained and armed. The army workers’ corps was provided permanently at the site (including filming).
We also cross-referenced Lott’s list of shootings with that found in the Mother Jones database.
We found that between 1998 and 2018, of 62 occasions of applicable mass shootings (as defined by Lott’s former FBI definition), only 24 occurred verifiably in gun-free zones, as explained through Lott. That’s 39 percent of the percentages declared through Lott and in the video. Twenty-one mass shootings (34 percent) took place in spaces that were not weapons-free at the time of the shooting. A mass shooting took up position in two locations, only one of which is known as a gun-free zone. You can download our research here.
In the case of the remaining incidents, we were unable to determine the legal prestige of a civilian with a firearm at the time and place of the shooting. Such prestige is sometimes based on a style of state legislation in which civilians engage in the transgression of criminals if they bring guns in personal corporations that have posted symptoms prohibiting guns on property, however, in many cases it has not been imaginable for us to determine whether a position in The Business Is Shown. such signage during a specific mass shooting
In any case, Lott’s investigation is far from it: since 1998, mass shootings have occurred much less in spaces without firearms, and much more occasionally outdoors in unarmed spaces, than he claims.
Another vital challenge here is the argument that not only do almost all mass shootings take up position in “gun-free zones” (which we have proven to be false), but that shooters intentionally point to those positions to avoid armed intervention. and maximize the damage they can inflict. There is simply no evidence of such motivation or scheme. As Mother Jones noted in the wake of Parkland’s bloodbath in February 2018, mass shooters occasionally interact on suicide missions (making armed intervention a questionable point) and occasionally have non-public ties to the places they target. The difficulties of adolescence or formative years mean that shooters target schools, which take the position of unarmed areas. Complaints about the work position or loss of tasks mean that shooters occasionally target businesses, which are also occasionally weapon-free areas.
The source of this statement is a 2016 editorial in the National Review, in which John Lott wrote that “From 2013 to 2015, the six states (plus the District of Columbia) that consistently banned open portability experienced a police death rate (20.2 as opposed to 17.3 consistently consisting of 100,000 officers).
This is ambiguous, however, Lott explained via email comparing the rate of police officers who were deliberately shot in the line of duty in those seven territories (unlike the United States as a whole) between 2013 and 2015. The states included in this comparison were California, Florida, Illinois, New York, South Carolina, Texas and the District of Columbia. Texas law was amended to allow open deferment from January 1, 2016, but open deferment was prohibited during the era discussed through Lott.
For the number of police officers in each state during those years, Lott used FBI statistics. For the number of police deaths, he used the knowledge of the Constable Down memorial page.
According to an analysis that Lott sent us (which you can download here), 17.8 shooting deaths occurred per 100,000 police officers in the seven territories that banned open carry, as opposed to 17.3 shooting deaths per 100,000 police officers in the rest of the country. That’s a very small difference, and a far cry from the gap articulated by Lott in his National Review article (“20.2 versus 17.3 per 100,000 officers”).
We replicated Lott’s research with slight methodological adjustments (we use the number of officials per year instead of just 2014) and come to a similar conclusion: a mortality rate of 18.1 in the seven territories where open portability was banned compared to 17.8 in the rest of the country. It’s still a very slight difference. And when we extend our own research to six years between 2010 and 2015, using precisely the same criteria as Lott, we found that the trend reversed.
During this period consistent with the period, 34 deaths from intentional police fires occurred with 100,000 officers in spaces where open transport was prohibited, compared to 46 shooting deaths in the rest of the country. (You can download our knowledge here.) This does not mean that the presence of open portability bans in some states has reduced the rate of police deaths in shootings; we don’t intend any causal correlation. However, our six-year knowledge investigation (rather than just three) undermines any broader statement of a reverse correlation between open gun ownership and the threat to police officers.
This statistic comes from a 2016 survey conducted by the National Association of Chiefs of Police. The question that was asked was, in fact, “Does its branch have national popularity of state-issued hidden weapons licenses?”
The percentage stated in the video (86.4 percent) is accurate, but the responses tallied were given in reply to a more specific question than simply whether the command officers “support concealed carry.” Moreover, we found no evidence that the question was answered by 20,000 police chiefs and sheriffs, as the video claims. In fact, the list of survey questions offered no details about the survey’s methodology, except that the questions were “posed by mail.” We asked NACOP for details but did not receive a response, and lacking such details we can’t really say much about the validity of the survey.
This statement also originates from an investigation published through John Lott, and is inconsistent. Overall, Lott uses figures from Police Quarterly magazine to conclude that between 2005 and 2007, police officers committed crimes nationwide at a rate of 124 crimes, consisting of 100,000 members.
The scope of the Policy Quarterly is broad in one respect, covering all incidents of police arrest (rather than restricting knowledge to incidents in which officials were charged and convicted of crimes). But the scope of the review was also limited in the fact that knowledge problems were compiled from media reports on police arrests (a weakness lott acknowledges).
On the other hand, Lott cites a very different source, a radically different methodology, to compare the rate of police crime with the crime rate of hidden weapons licensees.
Hidden transport license holders are even more law-abiding. Between October 1, 1987 and January 31, 2015, Florida revoked 9,366 concealed weapons licenses for misdemeanors or crimes. This is an annual rate of 12.5 consisting of 100,000 licensees, one-tenth of the rate at which civil servants spend crimes and crimes. In Texas, in 2012, the last year of available knowledge, 120 licensees were convicted of misdemeanors or crimes, a rate of 20.5 consisting of 100,000, still only one-sixth of the police tax …
Possibly, these comparisons would seem reasonable at first glance, but in reality they are based on a very fragile methodology.
For police, Lott bases the crime rate on news reports about arrests nationwide from 2005 to 2007. For concealed permit holders, he bases the crime rate on permit revocations (not arrests) in just two states (from 1987 to 2015 for one state, and in 2012 for the other). The nature of the data he relies upon (news media reports about arrests vs. gun license revocations) are each incomplete measures of crime. To use them as the basis of a comparison of the criminality between two cohorts (police officers and concealed weapons permit holders) is simply not supportable.
The police may have a tendency to devote crimes at a higher rate than civilians with hidden entry permits (or else it might be true), but Lott’s investigation is not a false evidence of this.
This is also taken from John Lott’s 2016 editorial in the National Review, in which he wrote:
The research in my new book, The War on Arms, shows that the accumulation of one percentage point in gun ownership is related to a 3.6% reduction in the number of police officers killed.
In this statement, Lott referred to his 2015 blog post that argues against an exam through the American Journal of Public Health, which in turn discovered a correlation between the highest rates of gun ownership and fatal shooting of police officers on duty.
This is complicated, but in short, Lott objected to the examination methodology, which for the maximum component did not use gun ownership figures, but rather was concerned with using the percentage of suicides finished with a firearm as a rough estimate of gun ownership. in the states.
This is an abbreviation commonly used for gun possession, but is imperfect. In his blog post, Lott expressed rather fear about the strength of this measure, however, he used it “for comparison purposes” in his own analysis, which concluded that a 1% increase in gun ownership (i.e. the percentage of suicides with firearms) was similar to a minimum of 3.62% in police shooting deaths.
It is one thing to question or reject the effects of an examination using the same method of consultation used in this exam, and it is another thing to use this research more broadly, as Lott did in his article in the National Review. There, he stated a correlation between gun possession and police deaths, based on a measure he himself claimed had “expressed considerations about … many times.” This is not a sustainable position.
Nor is the video’s assertion that “there is a transparent correlation between increased possession of firearms and relief from police killings” is also not based on available evidence. This specific factor remains largely unresolved.
It is true that Switzerland has a relatively high prevalence of sound-consistent firearms, at least according to the now obsolete 2007 Small Arms Survey, widely cited on all sides of the arms debate. With 46 firearms consisting of 100 inhabitants, Switzerland ranks third in the world, the United States and Yemen. The rate of firearms killings is also relatively low in Switzerland: in 2004, the last year for the United Nations to have official statistics for Switzerland, the country had a 0.8 firearms kill rate of 100,000 people, the ninth in 67 countries.
According to knowledge compiled through GunPolicy.org, a study task hosted at the University of Sydney in Australia, the rate of firearms killings in Switzerland was 0.21 consistent with another 100,000 people in 2015. Although not all the figures in its rating are for the same year, this would mean that Switzerland has the 15th lowest rate of firearm-related murders in 75 countries around the world, a low rate.
In the video, MAGA Midge argues that there is no undeniable “one-to-one” correlation between a higher prevalence of firearms and a higher rate of firearms killings, because Switzerland, after all, has a very high prevalence of firearms. and a low rate of firearms murders. This is a moderate point, however, switzerland’s remote example also does not deserve to be noted as evidence that dating is sometimes causal (i.e., a high prevalence of firearms leads to a decrease in the rate of firearms killings).
The causes that contribute to a country’s homicide rate are many and complex, as we have examined at length in the past. The prevalence of firearms might interact with other factors and have an effect on the murder rate in one country — while in others, it might have no bearing whatsoever.
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