Citation

Lankford A. Econ J. Watch 2020; 17(1): 40-55.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Institute of Spontaneous Order Economics)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Public mass shootings have traumatized Americans for more than fifty years. Notable examples include the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting, the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald's shooting, the 1986 Edmond post office shooting, and the 1991 Luby's Cafeteria shooting. Other horrific incidents include Columbine in 1999, Virginia Tech in 2007, the Aurora movie theater shooting in 2012, and the Sandy Hook shooting that same year. More recent tragedies include the mass shootings at a concert in Las Vegas in 2017, at a high school in Parkland, Florida in 2018, and at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019. Over the same period, similar incidents seem to have been extremely rare in other countries, and many Americans have demanded to know why. I was also curious to find out, so several years ago I conducted a cross-national study of public mass shooters (Lankford 2016). The goal was simple: to measure how often public mass shooters attack in different countries, and identify variables that help explain why some countries have more than others. To make the study's focus clear, I cited the Department of Homeland Security's definition of active shooter--"an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area"--and noted that "their attacks must have (a) involved a firearm, (b) appeared to have struck random strangers or bystanders and not only specific targets, and (c) not occurred solely in domestic settings or have been primarily gang-related, drive-by shootings, hostage-taking incidents, or robberies" (Lankford 2016, 190). I also emphasized that "attackers who struck outdoors were included; attackers who committed sponsored acts of genocide or terrorism were not" and that "only offenders who killed four or more victims were included in this study" (ibid., 190-191). The results indicated that the United States had 30.8 percent of all public mass shooters from 1966-2012, despite having less than five percent of the world's population (Lankford 2016). The United States' status as leader in this unfortunate category was consistent with findings from previous research on rampage school shooters (Böckler et al. 2013) and public mass shooters (Lemieux 2014). My results also showed a statistically significant association between national firearm ownership rates and the number of public mass shooters per country, which was also consistent with prior research (Lemieux 2014), and persisted whether the United States was included in the analysis or not (Lankford 2016). Unfortunately, John Lott and Carlisle Moody (2019; 2020) have created a great deal of confusion with their recent claims, which grossly underestimate the United States' global share of public mass shootings. Here I explain: 1. why analyzing public mass shootings and other types of attacks as a single form of violence is as flawed as claiming that tornadoes and hurricanes are a single type of storm; 2. how readers can sort Lott and Moody's dataset to more accurately estimate the United States' global share of public mass shootings; 3. how Lott and Moody misrepresent approximately 1,000 foreign cases from their own dataset, and what the corrected figures actually show; 4. why readers should think twice about trusting Lott and Moody's claims. © 2020, Fraser Institute. All rights reserved.

Language: en