Let’s Talk Actual Truth About ‘Gun Homicides’ And America’s Place in the World

“Mass shootings are a uniquely American problem!”

How many times have you heard someone say something along those lines? I’ve heard it more times than I care to count, from President Barack Obama to the armchair gun grabbers who will talk a big game behind the keyboard but would faint at the sight of a single firearm, much less the amount of firepower on the floor of the NRA Annual Meeting or SHOT Show.

They’re convinced that this is the absolute truth.

And on every level, they’re wrong, as our own Ryan Petty noted in a piece he wrote for The Federalist on Friday.

But here’s the sleight of hand: When attempting to make a point about targeted school attacks, activists change the terminology to the more generic “gun homicide,” or “mass shooting.” Gun homicide is any murder committed with a firearm. The causes and solutions to each of these problems is unique. The point of claiming America suffers from exponentially more gun violence serves one purpose: pressuring lawmakers to enact stringent gun control measures. 

Further, gun control activists rely on disreputable sources such as the Gun Violence Archive and the K-12 School Shooting Database, which use an overly broad definition of school attacks, including incidents after school hours, unrelated local gang violence, and even shootings that take place off campus. Both source online news reports rather than law enforcement data and rarely revise their figures after more reliable reporting is available. With each passing year, law enforcement data for 2025 will undoubtedly tell a different story than the one promoted by activists, but accurate data requires time to compile, and they choose not to wait.

The truth is that targeted attacks on schools — and similarly vulnerable locations — are not uniquely American. They are global phenomena driven by evil, not geography or firearms laws.

…

Global Problem

John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, has extensively studied the global phenomenon of mass violence. Lott’s research debunks the common misconception that America leads the world in mass shootings or school violence. “While the U.S. had about 4.5 percent of the world’s population during this period, it had just 2.9 percent of the public mass shootings — or even less, since our non-U.S. data is surely missing many cases,” according to Lott and his co-author Carlisle E. Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who researches the economics of crime.

According to their extensive data analysis, many countries have a higher per capita rates of mass shootings. However, media bias obscures these facts, propagating a skewed and politically expedient narrative that singles out America and guns as uniquely culpable.

Now, understand that it’s important that we compare mass shootings to populations. Otherwise, we get a very skewed perspective.

We use per capita rates because it’s the most reasonable way to compare disparate population sizes in any meaningful way. If you tried to compare the number of homicides between Rhode Island and, say, California, you’re always going to find more homicides in California., Yet by using a per capita measurement–comparing the number of homicides to the population in a standard way–you might find out that Rhode Island has a higher homicide rate.

I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m just using that as an example with “figures” pulled from my posterior to make the point, which I think it did.

So why do we have this perspective?

Well, because we have a media that is thoroughly uninterested in mass murders outside of the United States. If they report them at all, they forget about them as soon as they drop out of the new cycle. And that’s me being generous.

Those mass murders don’t fit the narrative at all, so there are likely other reasons they’re “forgotten” so quickly. Knowing that some maniac in Russia can kill school children just as easily as our domestic whack jobs negates the claim that this is “uniquely American” and thus warrants strict gun control.

It’s a game they’re trying to play, and the stakes are your rights, and they’re trying to leverage our children’s safety to accomplish it.

Yet, as I’ve noted, FSU involved numerous failures of gun control. Most mass murders do.

We can do better, but not until we can start having honest conversations for a change instead of…whatever the hell it is we’ve been having up to now.