UPDATED: Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Europe - Crime Prevention Research CenterCrime Prevention Research Center

UPDATED: Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Europe - Crime Prevention Research CenterCrime Prevention Research Center: 1) In his address to the nation after the Charleston attack, Obama claimed: “we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of ore ass violence aweoes not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.”



Senator Harry Reid made a similar statement on June 23rd: “The United States is the only advanced country where this type of mass violence occurs. Let’s do something. We can expand, for example, background checks. … We should support not giving guns to people who are mentally ill and felons.”







We prefer not to make purely cross-sectional comparisons, but this claim is simply not true.



 The data below looks at the period of time from the beginning of the Obama administration in January 2009 until the end of 2015. Mass public shootings – defined as four or more people killed in a public place, and not in the course of committing another crime, and not involving struggles over sovereignty.



The focus on excluding shootings that do not involve other crimes (e.g., gang fights or robberies) has been used from the original research by Lott and Landes to more recently the FBI) from 2009 to the Charleston massacre (this matches the starting period for another recent study we did on US shootings and we chose that because that was the starting point that Bloomberg’s group had picked). The cases were complied doing a news search. The starting year was picked simply because it was the beginning of the Obama administration and it matched the time frame of a recent Bloomberg report (a report that we evaluated here). A comparison across the entire world is available here.






Some people have defended President Obama’s statement by pointing to
the word “frequency.”  But, even if one puts it in terms of frequency,
the president’s statement is still false, with the US ranking 12th
compared to European countries.



CONTINUED 



 See original work for more on this and other stories.