Anatomy of hyped mass shooting statistics.

From 1900 to 1928, African-American gunmen killed 40 people in seven separate incidents – six of them in the South, and the last incident in Chicago. Rampant racism of the day mitigated against widespread news coverage: Either the gunmen were targeting cops in response to police brutality -- or the victims themselves were African-American, which apparently limited media interest.

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And yet, the Las Vegas shooting of Oct. 1, 2017, the deadliest in U.S. history, was foreshadowed more than a century earlier in small-town Kansas. Holed up in the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, the Vegas gunman opened fire on patrons at a music concert. On Aug. 13, 1903, 30-year-old Spanish-American War veteran Gilbert Twigg used a .12-gauge shotgun on a crowd at an outdoor concert Winfield, Kan. Twigg killed nine people and wounded many more before turning a revolver on himself.

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Lankford indicated that he was inspired by this approach, used the same time frame, and the same methods -- and he credited the NYPD in his own paper. “Data for this study were drawn first from the New York City Police Department’s Active Shooter report,” he wrote. But that begs the question: How solid are the NYPD statistics?

The answer is that they are incomplete to the point of being completely unreliable, which the NYPD essentially admits in its 2012 report. The department conceded that its hunt for mass shootings merely consisted of doing online searches of publicly available Internet news sources. “The NYPD did not use special-access government sources to compile the cases,” it says. “All information is open-source and publicly available.” It apparently didn’t even access paywall-protected databases such as Lexis-Nexis. The NYPD acknowledged that this method obviously “has a strong sample bias towards recent incidents.”

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“Some of the predictions that I made were that we would see more fame-seeking shooters -- that they would try to kill more victims than anyone else had killed before and that they would try to attack in different ways and different locations because that's a different way to get attention,” he told one interviewer. “Seeing those predictions fulfilled is, well, it's terrible. At the same time, it’s confirmation that the assessment of what's going on here appears accurate.”

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lilmike1464 said:

Great read. I think that the fact that it isn’t anything new and not an “epidemic” is definitely something we can all agree upon. I do wonder why race matters in this article at all though. Race doesn’t define anything and further makes the left and race baters’ arguments that things of the past still affects them today since it’s being used in a statistic for mass shootings or killings. It’s so long ago it has no barring on our society just like other things from over 100-200 years ago don’t. It’s just something that could’ve been left out and still proved the same point. JMHO

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The mass media has so far rewarded their efforts and naively believed that media could not possibly hold such sway over calculated killers, much less have the ability to stop some of their crimes. We will show how the media's
misguided attempts to inform the public about these tragedies may ultimately be contributing to the perpetuation of them. In the past, warnings have been lost in the din of the “public’s right to know,” and First Amendment protections, but ulterior motives must now be called into question, too. Indeed, any attempt to curb the flow of information is likely to encounter considerable resistance, as the coverage of these events is recognized to significantly increase viewership and boost advertising (Schildkraut, 2014).

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danb said:

I think that the point about race is really highlighting reporting bias. Reporting bias plays a very large role in obtaining these statistics. Race, sadly, plays a very large role in reporting bias.

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