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The US just passed 500 mass shootings? Not really

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Mass shootings are a particular scourge in this nation and one that we do need to find a way to address. The idea of someone just randomly deciding to take a firearm and attack anyone and everyone in a given place for no reason boggles the mind, and yet it does happen all too often.

In fact, a report from The Hill says we just passed 500 such shootings this year and there’s still a fair bit of year left.

That’s not good, but let’s look at the report itself, rather than just the headline, and see what’s up.

The United States surpassed 500 mass shootings in 2023 over the weekend, according to the data from the Gun Violence Archive.

As of Sunday, the Gun Violence Archive reported 501 mass shootings so far in 2023, after a shooting in Denver, Colo. Saturday night marked the 500th mass shooting of the year.

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Data from the Gun Violence Archive — which logs mass shootings in cases where there are four or more individuals wounded or killed in a shooting—found the total number of mass shootings in 2023 is so far lower than the past three years’ totals, but already higher than in 2019, which had 414 mass shootings and in 2018, which had 335 mass shootings.

2021 had the highest-ever number of mass shootings in the U.S. with 689 reported mass shootings, the Gun Violence Archive’s data shows. The number of mass shootings fell in 2022 to 645, although FBI data showed a rise in the total number of Americans wounded in such events between 2021 and 2022.

The FBI defines a mass shooting as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area,” a definition that varies from other metrics that focus on the number of total victims in evaluating a shooting.

Point of order, that’s actually the definition the FBI uses of an active shooter. There’s a difference between that and a mass shooter. I’m not sure if the FBI now conflates the two, but in years past, the FBI defined a mass shooting as one where four or more people were killed.

And that’s closer to what people think a mass shooting actually is.

What Gun Violence Archive does is tone down the definition of a mass shooting to the point that gang fights where no one is even seriously injured, all in an effort to inflate the number of mass shootings so as to scare Americans into supporting gun control.

Sure, they claim to be non-partisan, but that doesn’t mean they’re neutral by any stretch of the imagination.

Then folks at sites like The Hill repeat what they say uncritically, pretend that their definition has some degree of validity that no one else does, and then people freak out.

To put it in perspective, USA Today has tracked mass killings since 2006. They use a definition like I one I credited to the FBI above, four or more people killed. They give a 24-hour window, which makes it so spree killers are included.

They do not just look at mass murders committed with firearms, though. Any mass killing gets lumped in just the same. Guns, knives, bombs, cars, it doesn’t matter. They’re all considered equally. If they’d started in, say, 2000, 9/11 would have been tracked.

During that entire time, USA Today has tracked just 566 mass killings in total as of this writing.

“Why does it matter?”

Because mass shootings, awful as they are, aren’t everyday occurrences. Yet places like Gun Violence Archive and the media outlets that use their numbers want you to think that they are.

The problem is that when you see something like this as an everyday thing, people are much less likely to look at them and address them as the rare events that they actually are.

Gang fights aren’t solved with the same tools something like Las Vegas would be. They’re completely different situations, yet the Gun Violence Archive continually muddies the waters and makes people feel like mass shootings are happening all the time.

They’re trying to scare the American people and, thanks to places like The Hill, it’s working.

Heritage’s Swearer takes aim at “bumper sticker solutions”

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The Heritage Foundation’s Amy Swearer is their go-to for guns and the Second Amendment.

She’s spoken before Congress and she’s spoken on Twitter, now X. Granted, that last isn’t so impressive since I’ve done that too and I’m anything but impressive.

Yet she often speaks on Second Amendment issues and does so very well.

Much of that is at The Heritage Foundation and their news site, The Daily Signal.

As we currently deal with the aftermath of Jacksonville, Swearer is taking issue with what was termed “bumper sticker solutions” to things like mass shootings.

Another gunman targeted innocent victims in another mass public shooting this week, this time in Jacksonville, Florida. The resulting political outcry from gun control activists is as predictable as it is pointless.

They’ll demand red flag laws, waiting periods, and a minimum purchase age for firearms.

Never mind that Florida has had these laws on the books for years—they’ll demand them anyway.

They’ll insist this is why we need so-called universal background checks, either not understanding or not caring that the problem with mass public shooters isn’t that they evade existing background check laws, but that they (with very few exceptions) can and do pass background checks despite clear warning signs. They don’t care, of course, if they further burden common, low-risk gun transfers without in any way addressing the real problem. They just have to “do something.”

They’ll blame the so-called “Charleston Loophole,” the greatly maligned three-day limit on the government’s power to delay a gun transfer while it conducts a background check. It won’t matter in the slightest that Florida “closed” that alleged loophole.

They’ll allege that the shooting is the fault of Florida’s supposedly lax public carry laws. Of course, they’ll forget to mention that mass public shooters don’t care about laws prohibiting murder, much less laws telling them not to carry guns in public. They’ll gloss right over the fact that many shooters even target “no gun zones” precisely because they know law-abiding victims won’t be armed. And they’ll conveniently ignore that the Jacksonville gunman appeared to have the same idea, initially targeting a college campus, where the carrying of firearms is prohibited.

Swearer also points out that mass shooters aren’t going to be inhibited by magazine capacity limits as they bring extra magazines or weapons.

She also notes that the Jacksonville gunman turned away from his first target due to an armed security guard approaching him.

What we know about mass shootings is that those who wish to carry out such an attack will do so. You’re not likely to deter such an attack with new laws. Mass shooters can do horrific things within the framework of any gun control scheme.

That’s why we have, in fact, seen them all over the world despite people thinking of them as uniquely American. They’re not.

If that’s the case, though, then we should be looking elsewhere for solutions to the issue of mass shootings. Unfortunately, we can’t.

We can’t because the media and politicians are so focused on restricting our rights for things we had no hand in doing that they can’t even begin to look beyond gun control. Not that they want to, mind you, but that’s where we’re going to find the solution to ending mass shootings.

Unless, of course, mass shootings are just a pretext for pushing for all the gun control they wanted in the first place, which is pretty damn likely in my book.

If that’s the case, nothing will change, people will be killed, and absolutely nothing will be accomplished because ending the stated problem isn’t the actual goal.

But I’ve become pretty cynical of late, so don’t mind me.

How anti-gunners torture facts to push gun control

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The gun control side of things tends to look at the Second Amendment as an obstacle if they even bother to acknowledge it.

Most tend to just demand gun regulations with zero regard for the right to keep and bear arms. If they acknowledge it at all, it’s through a tortured revisionist history–which involves pretending reality is revisionist as we’ve recently seen.

That involves torturing facts and reality to try and advance their agenda, but it doesn’t stop just there.

Take this op-ed, for example.

Three killed in Jacksonville, one killed at Chapel Hill, one killed in Choctaw, Oklahoma and seven injured in Boston.

When will we realize that thoughts and prayers are not enough to save lives? One more mass shooting? Two? Is 400 this year not enough? Nowhere else in the world faces this problem, so why should we be any different?

Why are we too good for common sense gun laws?

Well, let’s take a step back here for a moment.

Jacksonville was, without a doubt, a mass shooting. By some definitions, Boston might be considered as such, though we tend to disagree here.

Yet Chapel Hill and Choctaw, Oklahoma weren’t mass shootings by any definition.

Both of these were simply cases of one person shooting and killing another. What’s more, both are actually examples of gun control laws failing.

Chapel Hill took place on the UNC campus, where carrying a firearm was prohibited. It didn’t stop the alleged killer from taking the life of his advisor.

Choctaw took place at a high school football game and involved a 15-year-old allegedly shooting and killing a 16-year-old.  The last time I checked, high school kids couldn’t lawfully purchase firearms, much less carry them to school football games lawfully.

But the author doesn’t acknowledge these facts.

Instead, he just includes those shootings as if they’re relevant and then goes on to examine Jacksonville and how that alleged shooter got his guns.

Yet that examination falls apart when you look at the rest of the shootings he cited.

As noted, Choctaw involved an underage person in possession of a firearm. UNC involved carrying a gun somewhere where it was illegal to have one. Yet the problems for this argument don’t stop there.

I acknowledged that some would consider Boston a mass shooting despite no one having been killed.

Yet even there, gun control also failed to stop the shooting, and that was in heavily gun-controlled Massachusetts.

We now know that at least one of the people accused of being part of that shooting is facing weapons charges–something you don’t generally face if you own your gun legally.

Not only was this a prohibited person in possession of a firearm, but he allegedly had a full-auto switch on that firearm.

The author has tortured reality to present the idea that all these other shootings–shootings he cited–were similar to Jacksonville in some way. However, in all three, gun control laws failed to prevent the shootings themselves, though they failed in different ways.

What’s more, there’s absolutely no way the author was unaware of any of these facts.

Then again, expecting honesty from a gun grabber is like expecting coherence out of Joe Biden on any given day.

Lott calls out FBI data on good guys stopping mass shootings

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While they account for only a tiny fraction of the firearm-related fatalities each and every year, mass shootings seem to be what more people are worried about.

We know, though, that part of how we can end the issue itself is through good guys with guns ending the threat.

If you think about it for half a second, it makes sense. Picture some maniac produces a firearm and starts shooting at people indiscriminately. What’s going to stop them? It won’t be calm, kind words as a general thing.

What we know is that historically, they end when the good guys with guns get there.

If they’re already there, though, it ends a lot faster.

Yet there is a problem with the data on this topic. The FBI appears to be cooking the books. At least, that seems to be what John Lott found.

To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.

It isn’t surprising that people will miss cases or occasionally misidentify them when using news stories, but the FBI was unwilling to fix its errors when I pointed them out. My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. Back in 2015, I published a list of missed cases in a criminology publication.

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The CPRC’s numbers tell a different story: Out of 440 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2022, an armed citizen stopped 157. We also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard.

We found these cases on a budget of just a few thousand dollars. Though we found that armed citizens had stopped eight times as many cases as the FBI claims, I make no assertion that we unearthed all of these stories. It is quite possible that the news media itself never covers many such incidents.

While the FBI claims that just 4.6 percent of active shootings were stopped by law-abiding citizens carrying guns, the percentage that I found was 35.7 percent. I am more confident that we have identified a higher share of recent cases, and our figure for 2022 was even higher – 41.3 percent.

The FBI has been made aware of this discrepancy. They’ve just elected not to do anything about it.

Honestly, though, that’s not surprising. We’ve all seen how various parts of the United States government have been weaponized in recent years, all to focus on a single side of the political spectrum. That’s generally the same side that favors gun rights.

This would be the same government that has been doing some seriously shady stuff in recent years with regard to lawful gun ownership. With the FBI answering to the same people, are we shocked that they prefer the inaccurate but much lower number?

Not really.

The truth is that good guys with guns can and do stop mass shootings, often before they ever have a chance to reach the “mass shooting” threshold.

That’s a win. That’s a good thing that should be celebrated.

Except that, it means gun rights are good things, that concealed or constitutional carry is a good thing. They can’t have that, so the books get cooked.

Oh, the original issue might have been a mistake, but the fact that they refuse to correct is a willful act, so I’d call it cooking the books, even if the FBI disagrees.

Some mass shooting survivors aren’t fans of gun control

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It never fails.

Anytime there’s a mass shooting anywhere in the nation, we’ll get the “survivors” stepping up to tell us how this is proof that we need gun control.

In fact, people would be shocked to learn that some mass shooting survivors aren’t fans of gun control at all. They recognize that the problem lies in people, not things; that all the gun control in the world won’t stop someone determined to kill as many people as possible.

Part of that is because the mainstream media lionizes people like David Hogg while pretending people like this don’t exist.

“It’s maddening that we go straight to a gun control debate,” Evan Todd, a survivor of the notorious 1999 Columbine High School shooting, told me on this week’s episode of “Higher Ground With Billy Hallowell” podcast (subscribe here). “Because, in the end, that will not solve the problem.”

Mr. Todd knows firsthand what true depravity and wickedness look like. He was inside the library at his school in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, when two student gunmen slaughtered 12 students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.

Not only was Mr. Todd shot during the ordeal, but he was also the last person to speak with the gunmen, somehow convincing them not to take his life.

Since the shooting, however, Mr. Todd has emerged as a vocal proponent of the Second Amendment, departing from comments and proclamations made by other mass shooting survivors who have vociferously pushed politicians for stricter gun control measures.

For Mr. Todd, the answers to our gun violence woes are more rooted in school safety than in cracking down on constitutional freedoms.

“The first thing that we should be saying as parents is [that] we need to secure and protect our schools,” Mr. Todd said. “That is the first step we should be taking.”

For the record, I agree with Todd on this.

What’s more, this shouldn’t be a controversial position. Even if we enacted every bit of gun control pushed by groups like Giffords, Everytown, and Brady, our kids would still be vulnerable. Deep down inside, I think most gun control advocates know this, too.

They just can’t seem to bring themselves to acknowledge it.

In my time here at Bearing Arms, I’ve written about mass shootings all over the world. I’ve talked about them in places like the UK and Russia, both very different nations yet both with strict gun control rules in place.

So it always strikes me as odd that we’re told that the issue here is purely one of insufficient gun control laws.

Todd survived a mass shooting. He survived one of the most infamous mass shootings of all time, and unlike many so-called survivors, he was actually shot. He’s someone who, if he pushed an anti-gun agenda, would likely be on our television screens for weeks after a mass shooting.

He’s someone we’d be told we have to listen to on this.

Yet because he’s saying school security is more important, that we need to make our schools tougher targets so potential mass murderers will have to look elsewhere, he won’t be on MSNBC or CNN.

It’s a shame, too, because school security should be something we can all get behind, even as we debate gun control.