Mass shootings – not only in America

If you’re not in a coma, you know the country has seen a spate of mass shootings in public places. Because our conventional media want gun control, they publicize anything that could possibly qualify as a mass shooting.

So they give their readers, listeners, and viewers the impression that mass shootings happen only in America. Even U.S. Senators, who should know better, let these media narrators convince them of that statement. (Case in point: Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, let a young Australian reporter scare him off and never challenged his “only in America” canard.)

But all of it is a pack of lies.

Mass shootings – what are they?

To begin with, even people trying to push gun control can’t agree on how to define mass shootings. The RAND Corporation told us that last year. From official databases to left-wing publications, no one can agree on what a mass shooting is, or isn’t.

RAND also tells us that mass shootings are rare. In fact they’re so rare that people can’t reliably tell what good anti-mass-shooting policies might do. So why do we keep hearing about them? Because our media tell us. Tragedy sells, violence sells, blood and gore sell – and sometimes certain narratives sell. In contrast, governments in many other countries run the media, and they’re not telling.

RAND did offer one telling recommendation. Focus on ways to prevent violence more broadly, they say, and all kinds of shootings, including mass shootings, will decline.

But the media, and leftist politicians and activists, don’t want to focus on preventing violence. That might require, say, overruling Lemon v. Kurtzman and putting prayer back into our schools. When Earl Warren and colleagues took God out of our schools, they created a vacuum. Without God, society then needs a dictatorial elite. This is what President John Adams meant when he said our Constitution was for a moral and religious people, and inadequate to govern a people without God.

Naturally this oligarchy wants to disarm the public. So when mass shootings occur, they rush in and shout, “GIVE! US! YOUR! GUNS!” As Beto O’Rourke did two days ago.

What about mass shootings worldwide?

Apart from RAND, John R. Lott has actually studied the problem of mass shootings, in America and around the world. He found that these shootings do not happen “only in America.” In fact:

Not only have these attacks been much more common outside the US, the US’s share of these attacks has declined over time. There has been a much bigger increase over time in the number of mass shootings in the rest of the world compared to the US.

In fact, of 101 countries Mr. Lott studied, the United States ranked 66^th in attacks per 100,000 population and 56^th in fatalities. Nor can Western Europe brag too much about having it under control. France, for instance, saw fewer attacks but more people killed in proportion to their numbers.

In contrast, the leftist media latched on to a competing study by Professor Adam Lankford at the University of Alabama. He asserts that mass shootings happen, if not only in America, then far more often in America. But as John Stossel notes in this video,

Lankford might have missed mass shootings one reads about only in old print editions of papers not in English. Furthermore, Lankford studied only 292 mass shooting reports. Lott had more than 3,000 to work with. Why the difference?

Lankford has been less than transparent with his data – which seems to be a common problem. Lott has been scrupulously transparent. Result: others have checked Lott’s work. And found it true.

Where are we?

So we see a tale of two studies, and yet another sourcing war taking the place of honest inquiry. The left plumps for the oligarchy, and always has. That oligarchy needs to disarm the populace. Nothing else will serve.

And so they create conditions for more mass shootings, and more violence of other kinds, while pretending to decry it. In fact, over several decades, they have primed and groomed children, especially boys, to fight each other and tear each other down. No one in authority seems able or even willing to “break it up.” Nor does government policy even let them teach truly moral behavior, or even to offer better examples. As Dan Sanchez observed at the Foundation for Economic Education:

If we want people—young men especially—to reject the role of the Villain, we must encourage them to embrace the role of the Hero.

But our popular culture touts villainy as “cool” and denies that heroes even exist. Inevitably some boy or boys feels shut out, and wants to strike back. Their names are legion: Charles Whitman (the Eagle Scout and Marine who killed fourteen people from a clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966). More recently, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Adam Lanza. Nicolas Cruz. And now, Salvador Ramos.

Result: mass shootings. And calls for gun control.

But mass shootings do not happen “only in America” or even mostly in America. Nor will gun control stop the shootings we now see.