A CBS News article promulgated an irrational claim about mass shootings in the U.S. and was immediately mocked and ridiculed by those with at least a modicum of elementary math training.
The article from Sarah Horbacewicz repeated a claim that one out of every 15 adult Americans had been at a mass shooting but then offered zero critical analysis of that statistic. A University of Colorado study arrived at the claim by defining a mass shooting as an incident where four or more people had been shot.
‘Four seconds of critical thinking and math tell me it is not at all possible.’
The rest of the article was an appeal to the emotions that covered recent developments in the 2021 mass shooting at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado.
The claim received far more scrutiny from online critics of the media and defenders of the Second Amendment.
“Four seconds of critical thinking and math tell me it is not at all possible that 17.3 million adults in the U.S. have witnessed a mass shooting,” responded investigative reporter Parker Thayer.
“Their methodology’s a mess,” replied another critic. “They’re using a crazy broad definition of ‘mass shooting,’ lumping in neighborhood shootouts and vague ‘public space’ criteria that obviously juice up exposure rates. They lean on online panels (YouGov, no less) that probably don’t adjust for overrepresented exposure groups — demographics skew who uses these panels. Self-reported lifetime exposure’s full of recall errors and murky ‘immediate vicinity’ interpretations, with zero verification.”
“The press, and the people feeding it (usually the ‘Gun Violence Archive’), have been slowly escalating these completely ridiculous claims, and now they’ve arrived … here,” said Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review.
“Antigunners gleefully sharing this are the same people who shriek with rage when some survey data on the high end shows three million Americans have used a gun for self defense,” responded attorney Kostas Moros.
A separate analysis of mass shooting statistics from the Cato Institute found that 298 mass murderers were responsible for 1,733 murders in the 58 years between 1966 and 2024. Cato found the annual chance of being murdered in a mass shooting was about one in 9.1 million.
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