Thread by @AndrewCFollett

A thread on how the media is telling you two major lies about mass shootings and gun control

1: Other countries with vastly stricter gun laws than the US have higher rates of mass shootings.

2: US jurisdictions w/ gun laws have exponentially higher rates of gun violence

#2A

Although events in the U.S. tend to get the lion's share of media exposure, mass shootings are clearly a worldwide issue.

The US makes up about 1.15% of the world's mass shootings while having almost 5% of the world's population.

Out of 97 countries with data, the US is 64th in frequency of mass shootings and 65th in murder rate.

And rates of mass shootings elsewhere are rising faster

4 times as many per capita died in mass shootings in FRANCE as in the US. 21 times in Norway.

In addition to those fairly nice nations, Finland, Germany, Israel, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland have higher mass shooting death rates.

All of those are pretty nice countries which MUCH stricter gun control laws than the US...and all have higher per capita deaths from mass shootings than the US.

According to this 2018 study (surveying data over an 18 year period), the US is 64th in the world in terms of mass shooting rates per capita (which sounds far worse than it is...because all the countries in gray below didn't report data.)

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

If anything our policy structure is actually pretty good at preventing this by global standards...especially relative to fairly nice countries of the type we want to compare America to.

2: The highest gun-ownership state with the loosest gun laws in the nation is Wyoming, where 59.7% of households have a gun (really!)

Wyoming gun laws are arguably the LEAST restrictive in the United States.

findlaw.com/state/wyoming-…

Wyoming does NOT HAVE a gun homicide problem, with a rate of only 1.4 per 100,000–actually lower than right across the border in more gun-controlled Canada– and only about a third of that of the nation as a whole.

The highest murder rate of any jurisdiction in the US is Washington, DC, which has a murder rate of 21.8 per 100,000... more than twenty times that of most European countries!

But DC also has the most restrictive gun laws in the country... and the lowest rates of legal gun ownership, with numbers less than in many European states!

findlaw.com/state/dc-law/d…

[Gulp]

I'd say that data suggests that the factors making DC have such high gun violence rates are part of the story of why America as a whole is so deadly, but these cannot include high gun ownership or a lack of gun regulation...by definition.

If stricter gun laws reduced gun violence rates, you'd expect jurisdictions with those laws to have lower rates of gun violence.

Instead, we find quite the opposite.

Now, maybe you think "of course those jurisdictions have higher gun violence rates, that's why they enacted the laws."

I doubt that...but the data is CLEAR that those laws haven't reduced the rates.

The factors making DC so deadly are part of the story of why America as a whole is so deadly, but these cannot include high gun ownership.

Facts don't care about your feelings.

And blaming this on Republicans' (which Libs made trend ALL of yesterday is...stupid.

Washington DC hasn't had a Republican mayor since literally 1933...and hasn't had a single Republican on its city council since 2008.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m….

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m…

The same thing is true of ALL the cities with REALLY BAD gun homicide rates.

In 2019:

St Louis, 64.54 murders per 100k, last GOP Mayor left in 1949

Its the 9th most violent city in the world.

The murder rate in Baltimore is 58.27 per 100,000.

Its the 11th most violent city in the world...and has VERY strict gun laws.

This goes and and on down the list...check it for yourself.

I stopped looking for a Republican mayor after a while because it was all Dems forever.

cbsnews.com/pictures/murde…

Yet...as I noted yesterday...

Libs PRIMARY RESPONSE is to blame the GOP for this...when they are LITERALLY THE ONES IN CHARGE of the cities choking under gun violence.

https://twitter.com/AndrewCFollett/status/1529290055877070850?s=20&t=Yyj1vLiz2Us7DNc899ThOQ

You want to know how to convince me the Libs are serious about gun control?

When they actually bring down gun homicide rates in the cities they've politically dominated for decades.

Instead, they ALWAYS cast blame on everyone but themselves.

Talk to any Lib about Chicago gun violence...which is so bad there's literal websites dedicated to statistically tracking it...and they'll blame Indiana's gun laws.

heyjackass.com

This is because the ONLY move Libs have to distract from the fact that places they've subjected to VERY STRICT gun control laws is to...blame neighboring Republicans.

Laws that we know work (like cracking down on straw buyers) get entirely ignored in favor of oblivious attempts to gin up political support for policies we know DO NOT work bc we saw them fail in Dem controlled cities.

Statistically speaking, the most effective laws for reducing gun violence and gun homicides is cracking down on straw purchasing...that is someone buying a gun for a person not legally able to have one. And it isn't even close.

Basically every state (including ones with very intense gun laws) doesn't take straw purchases of firearms very seriously.

It's MOSTLY a misdemeanor. Nobody bothers to enforce it.

As Kevin W of NR says...this is because of bureaucratic laziness more than anything else.

Its easier to pressure a federally licensed retailers with fixed addresses and regular business hours than it is to go chasing Joe Gangster’s rap-sheet-free girlfriend all over St. Louis

Here's a rather well reported Washington Post story on how this works.

washingtonpost.com/classic-apps/o…

If you can't read it, its the saga of one specific straw purchased gun being used in a dozen criminal acts. The person who bought the gun committed a felony in the state (Virginia) where he bought it.

He pled guilty to this and got a slap on the wrist.

This is what annoys me so much about the "gun control" debate...its entirely media driven to gin up outrage, not solve problems.

Media shift the responsibility for criminal violence away from the criminals who did it and onto 3rd parties that are easier to police.

And who just so happen to have deeper pockets.

You can't sue Baker (the guy who bought the gun in the WaPo story) or Stunna (rapper who acquired the gun). There's no $ in that.

But u can shake down Bob' Shotgun Emporium or Remington & that's what Libs ACTUALLY want

Meanwhile, a few U.S. ZIP codes, practically all of them represented exclusively by political party which always promotes gun control, are plagued by gun homicides and nobody in power is willing to lift a pinky finger to do anything meaningful about it.

Nobody cares on the left cares about saving lives in this debate, they care about the prospect of letting their lawyer friends make money and getting a bit of desperately needed extra political energy.

That's all folks, going to dinner.

One last post on this topic...

Just wanted to address this point and others like it on the main thread as I can't do it in my messages due to volume.

Depending on your distribution, sometimes “outliers” are the only thing that matters.

I've said this before in replies, but it's REALLY sketchy to start your interval for recording the average number of terrorist attacks the day after the last major terrorist attack.

To steal an argument Suppose I’m trying to make an argument that earthquakes are NBD for Haiti.

I could make a graph showing that since January 13, 2010, fewer Haitians have died per year from earthquake-related causes than whatever, and say "why worry about outliers.

Well, the Haitian earthquake of January 12, 2010 killed about 100,000 people. Outlier is all that matters.

Also, I do not have a SoundCloud or Substack...even though I'm told that's the traditional thing to shill when going viral.

So instead let me shill my writing here at @NRO.

nationalreview.com/author/andrew-…

And the donate button for my wonderful employer.

clubforgrowth.org/donate-club-fo…