"Mass shootings" have reached "epidemic" levels according to the Communist left, and a complicit media apparatus that serves as the unofficial propaganda arm of the Communist Party. Americans today are experiencing unprecedented levels of gun violence wildly accelerating out of control. From the way it's portrayed by Marxist politicians, e.g., Bernie Sanders, and covered by equally Marxist journalists, you'd think something akin to a holocaust is occurring in the United States every year, every month, or even every day.
Here's the reality. According to the FBI there were 27 active shooter incidents in 2018. Of those 27 only 10 were mass shootings (i.e., met the federal criteria of 3 or more victims in a single incident).
So according to leftists, 10 mass shootings in one year resulting in 85 deaths in a nation of 320 million people, is an "epidemic." But 40,327 deaths to automobile crashes, an average of 110 fatalities a day, is not.
One will of course immediately observe that active shooter incidents still occurred in very anti-gun states like IL and CA, with the most occurring in CA, which has some of the strictest (if not the strictest) gun laws in the entire nation. Which might lead one to deduce that strict gun laws do little if anything to prevent mass shootings or protect people from them. But, I digress.
What does "epidemic" mean?
• "Extremely prevalent; widespread."Thing is, "mass shootings" are (according to the federal criteria) neither "extremely prevalent" in the United States, nor new or particularly rapidly spreading or increasing in occurrence. In 1970 the Ohio National Guard killed 4 students, and wounded 9 others, at Kent State University. In 1966 Charles Whitman shot and killed 14 people at the University of Texas. 7 men were gunned down in the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929. Going back farther still, the United States Army killed approximately 300 Lakota Indians, about 200 of which were women and children in 1890. But of course examples 1 and 4 don't count to leftists, as they were perpetrated by proxies of the state, the only entity that should have firearms. Likewise, the fact that governments have perpetrated mass murder on a vastly larger scale than any civilian "mass shooter" (or even scores of them) ever could, is likewise ignored as it doesn't fit the specious narrative that only firearms in the hands of those who are not agents of the state are "dangerous." (This despite the same leftists incessantly, simultaneously claiming that the military and police are systemically and irredeemably racist institutions, that murder brown people abroad for profit and "hunt" them domestically for fun.)
• "A rapid spread or increase in the occurrence of something."
Gun violence, contrary to what media coverage would have you believe, hasn't undergone any profound increase in severity or frequency. Quite to the contrary, what's increasing exponentially, is media coverage of gun violence. Again, 110 people die every day in automobiles in the U.S., and that receives nary a mention. But "mass shootings," all of which to date kill less people than automobiles on the same day, are mentioned. And whereas the most egregious of automobile accidents might receive a passing mention on the news, "mass shootings" by contrast are mentioned for days, weeks, or even months. The same disingenuously lachrymose journalists who bemoan the loss of life caused by guns, perfunctorily read the teleprompter regarding a "fatal" car accident without so much as a sniffle.
Because who cares about car accidents, when they've got charts like this?
Pretty conclusive, isn't it? There's clearly a trend, an increase in mass shooting fatalities occurring, as evinced by the line drawn across the image from left to right. Of course, when you compensate for the agenda line, this is what you see.
Maybe I'm crazy, but that's what I see, when I look at that chart. And that seems far less consistent and more random in nature. I see something that's sometimes lower and sometimes higher (for whatever reasons). There's also the problem that data, like anything else, can be significantly skewed without context. To give a simplistic example, if I presented data on mass shootings over a period of two days, and there were 0 shootings the first day and 2 shootings the second day, the data would reflect a 200% increase in mass shootings. Despite the fact that contextually, over a broader period of time, there's been no substantive increase.
The simple fact is that the farther you go back in time the less definitive data we have on shootings. So naturally, the farther you go back, the fewer shootings will be reflected by the data. Because beyond a certain point the data becomes far more unreliable or doesn't exist at all. You won't find FBI crime data for "mass shootings" in the year 1895, for example, because it didn't exist until 1908 and didn't start publishing that data until 1958. And even that data is apparently derived only from constabularies that voluntarily participate in the program.
Furthermore, that a "trend" is occurring is not proof it will continue to occur in perpetuity. As the chart shows, fatalities increase, only to just as suddenly and rapidly decrease. And even if there is a legitimate, perpetual increase in the aggregate of shooting fatalities annually, that likely has some correlation to the population perpetually increasing. More people, generally, is going to = more of a thing occurring. A chart showing toilet usage in the U.S., would no doubt likewise depict a perpetual/incremental increase, or "trend." Because more people are using toilets over time. And similarly, in a country with the right to bear arms, each new day will likely result in more people bearing those arms (some for nefarious purposes). Simply put, there are simply more criminals in the U.S. than there were in 1919. Because in 1919 the population was 104 million. Today it's more than tripled at 327 million. If 1% of the population committed a gun crime in 1919 it would have been 1,040,000 incidents. If 1% of the population committed a gun crime today it would be 3,270,000 incidents. So an increase in gun crime does not necessarily mean gun crime is "worse."
Personally, I've long said the only thing one needs to refute the notion that gun violence is getting worse, or is much worse than it used to be, is a $10 bill. When's the last time someone was killed in a gun duel by the Vice President of the United States? (Hint: 215 years.)
Note also that the criteria for a victim of a "mass shooting" in the last chart is dying in a shooting in which at least 2 people were killed. So mass, which means "pertaining to, involving, or affecting a large number of people," means as few as 3, or even 2, victims. Why? Because the fewer the number of people required, the greater the number of "mass shootings" can be alleged to have taken place, and the greater the number of causalities that can be attributed to such in charts like this one. (Which behooves anti-gun initiatives. If the criteria was 50 people killed in a single incident, then there'd be perhaps one "mass shooting" a decade, which obviously wouldn't make for good propaganda/hysteria fodder. So, for the purposes of making guns look as evil as possible, 2 or 3 people is a "large number of people.") At this rate I surmise before long shootings with only 1 fatality will be considered "mass" shootings. 3 is only 1 more than 2, and 2 is only 1 more than 1, after all. If someone can rationalize applying the term "mass" to 2 people, then it's little more of a stretch to apply it to 1 person, or to argue that there's really no such thing as individual shootings at all. Individual shootings are just part of an aggregate "mass" of shootings that comprises every victim of gun violence, etc. Because there really is no limit to the sophistry of leftists, as anyone who's ever dealt with them well knows.
It's also no coincidence I used the words random and nature in reference to the preceding chart. Because when you look at charts pertaining to mass shooting fatalities, they look remarkably similar to data charts for completely random events, like the weather. Take the number of hurricanes from 1860 to 2020 for example.
Alas, we see yet another apparent trend, conveyed by the line arbitrarily drawn across the chart by someone. Which should come as no surprise, as an alleged increase in unpleasant weather is likewise construed by the Marxist left and complicit media, as grounds to confer ever more regulatory power to the state (and revoke ever more freedom from the people).
"Our environment (is) being destroyed by the greed of a few obscenely wealthy capitalist groupings. [....] Threats to the environment continue to spiral out of control, threatening all life on our planet." - Communist Party Platform. (Parentheses mine.)But again, when you remove the presuppositional bias that is the trend line, this is what you see.
You can create trends of increasing hurricane activity (e.g.,1855-1860), or decreasing hurricane activity (e.g., 1885-1900), purely by where you decide to start and end the data. But in reality it's just a procession of random events. It should come as no surprise, however, that leftists think gun violence can be ended with regulation. When they literally believe you can diminish the severity of hurricanes, or prevent them entirely, in the same fashion.
The irony is one could argue that the excessive, and indeed obsessive media coverage of mass shootings, is a contributing factor to their occurrence. If video games that "glorify" violence are contributory, then surely the media that makes "mass shooters" celebrities and even household names, is likewise to blame. Surely the media, and the equally leftist Hollywood with its own de facto glorification (whether intentional or not) of the "mass" homicidal maniac, occasionally engenders such aspirations in some mentally unstable individual out there. Individuals who otherwise might not have thought of committing such a crime, if not for the assiduous coverage of such acts with which they're deluged by the media. Right?
Of course not, and how dare you even suggest such a thing. Leftists are never to blame for anything themselves. Only their political enemies are to blame. It's video games that dehumanize people, not a political ideology that has supported the systematic genocide of over 60 million children, because their lives are inconvenient or deemed not worth living by leftist eugenicists seeking a more perfect society.
