Mass Shooting Casualties since November 2016


Figure 1: Cumulative sum of mass shooting casualties, beginning 2016M11; deaths inflicted by non-Muslims (dark red), wounded inflicted by non-Muslims (pink), deaths inflicted by Muslims (dark blue), wounded inflicted by Muslims (light blue). Source: Mother Jones. Tabulations of religion of perpetrator by author.

Longer perspective displayed in this post.

12 thoughts on “Mass Shooting Casualties since November 2016

  1. AS

    Would the ratio of shootings done by Muslims and non-Muslims to the respective number of Muslims and non-Muslims in the US be a measure worth looking at? This is not an argumentative comment, just asking.

    1. Menzie Chinn Post author

      AS: Yes, that would be reasonable. I just did the breakdown I did because Mr. Trump has been focused on keeping out individuals from s***hole countries, but has made no mention of domestic terrorism. I could and should do a breakdown between caucasian men and all others.

      1. Moses Herzog

        I remember when the Murrah Building Bombing happened. It was about a 25 minute drive from my parents’ home. I could FEEL (and hear) the sound when the bomb went off. The closest thing I could think of to describe the sound, was like a loaded box car falling off a train off in the distance. Or maybe what you might imagine a loaded 53′ semi-trailer tipping over on it’s side would sound like (somewhat off in the distance). It was like a thud (you could feel in the ground). My Mom worked at a hospital then, relatively near to the Murrah building and immediately called asking if I had heard that, and that she wanted me to know she was ok. When she told me that, based on the distance, I told her I would wager alot of money it was a natural gas explosion near her work. Then not long after there was video on TV and you could see the smoke and general descriptions. When they finally showed the side of the building, they kept mentioning “this is like Beirut Lebanon”, “this is similar to Beirut Lebanon”, “Oh, this brings back images of Beirut Lebanon”. I felt a lot of anger at Arabs at that time. I was 100% convinced it was a Muslim who had done this and would have literally bet my life that is was an Arab Muslim attack. The reality ended up being a 27 year old white kid, raised in the state of New York, who had served in the US Army and seen combat. Did I mention he loved and was obsessed by guns and military munitions of all kinds??
        https://www.amazon.com/Others-Timothy-McVeigh-Oklahoma-Conspiracy/dp/1586480987

        https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utcah/03493/cah-03493.html

    2. PeakTrader

      AS, about two-thirds of the prison population is Muslim in France:

      “Mass incarceration of people of color is not just a problem in the United States. While Muslims make up about eight percent of France’s population, they comprise 60-70 percent of the country’s prison population.”

      https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/france-muslims-face-mass-incarceration

      In the U.S., about two-thirds of the prison population is black or Hispanic (although, many Hispanics list themselves as white).

      Security costs are also very expensive, even when not victimized.

      1. baffling

        “In the U.S., about two-thirds of the prison population is black or Hispanic (although, many Hispanics list themselves as white).”
        that is not an indictment of the minority population. that is an indictment of the criminal justice system. you don’t think it has significant problems?

        1. PeakTrader

          The problem is you’ve been brainwashed by the mainstream media.

          “Blacks make up approximately 13% of the US population while they commit 52% of crime.

          In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.

          Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population.”

  2. Bruce Hall

    No argument with the graphic except maybe context: https://i1.wp.com/thepoliticalinsider.com/content/uploads/2018/03/28070628_755524784633519_4083646850342076926_o-1521381323.jpg?resize=658%2C343&ssl=1

    From the article:
    º Only 12 percent of mass killings are mass public shootings. Most mass killings are familicides (murders of family members or intimate partners) and felony-related killings (such as robberies gone awry or gang-related “turf battles”)
    And here are some statistics that have implications regarding some control measures that have recently been proposed.

    º Over 90 percent of public mass shootings take place in “gun-free zones” where civilians are not permitted to carry firearms.
    º A complete ban on “assault weapons” will save very few lives: Six out of every 10 mass public shootings are carried out by handguns alone, while only one in 10 is committed with a rifle alone.
    º The average age of mass public shooters is 34, which means that increasing the minimum age for purchasing firearms would not target the main perpetrators of mass public shootings.
    º Few mass public shooters have used “high-capacity magazines,” and there is no evidence that the lethality of their attacks would have been affected by delays of two to four seconds to switch magazines. In fact, some of the largest mass shootings in U.S. history were carried out with “low-capacity” weapons
    ————
    º The largest number of fatalities involving one train: Sri Lanka Tsunami Rail Disaster, 2004 (1,700+ Casualties)
    º The greatest number of fatalities involving one aircraft occurred in 1985 when 520 people died in the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123.
    º At least 42 people, including 13 children, were killed after a bus collided with a trailer truck in southern Pakistan
    º Worst single car accident: <10 killed

    My takeaway is that one should never take a train and avoid a plane at all costs. Be very careful about riding in a bus. Enjoy your car trip; not much to worry about. /sarc

  3. Moses Herzog

    I do think the number of violent crimes committed by whites tends to fly under the radar more. And I also think there are other religions which play a larger part in sometimes encouraging violence than is acknowledged (including Protestant and Catholic).

    Having said that, the drastic jump in the pink numbers is extremely hard for me to buy. That is to say—I 100% trust the way Menzie has tabulated the numbers, I trust his math, I trust Menzie’s empirical integrity implicitly. I have read enough of Menzie’s blog, research papers, and his book for him to have earned that trust. My question here would be how Mother Jones (who I also generally trust, but not quite on the level I trust Menzie) collected the data points. I can’t think of the right statistics terminology to use here, but I think there are data points prior to mid-August ’17 that are not being recognized here somehow.

    At the horrifying risk of sounding “Ed Hanson-ish” (which I really do not want to sound like) I just do not buy that the pink portion of the chart jumped that high out of nowhere. (Trump extremists included). That is to say, I might buy the pink part of the chart—but I don’t buy the absence of pink pre-August ’17. Whatever that’s worth from a guy who apparently can’t even do an OLS linear regression.

    1. Menzie Chinn Post author

      Moses Herzog: Because the mass shooting criteria (as used by Mother Jones) requires at least three dead, then there could have been “mass shootings” where multiple injuries occur, but is not counted in the statistics by Mother Jones.

  4. CoRev

    The other side of the gun control argument, Defensive Gun Use (DGU) , is almost never published. Even CDC has done studies without publishing them, and since the 90s actual data indicates ~2.5M times per year guns were used as a defense. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3124326 Does that mean 2.5M times per year a crime or a large number of deaths are prevented?

    Yes SSRN contains many unpublished studies, as is this one, but unpublished series, why?

    My guess, it is too far from the preferred message.

    1. Menzie Chinn Post author

      CoRev: If you understood the scientific/academic publishing business, you would understand why. The date on the paper is 2018. Many papers are circulated in working paper form to get comments, that authors can respond to. Waiting until publication in a peer reviewed journal can take a long time. In addition, sometimes the errors/faults with a paper are so grievious that the paper is never published. That is why peer review exists — to screen out papers. Is it a perfect system? No. But it certainly is an important piece of information to know that a specific paper that has circulated for many years is still unpublished.

      So, brush away your nightmares of literary black helicopters…

      1. CoRev

        Menzie, i know enough of the peer review process to know your generalization are many times untrue, when the subject matter goes against the preferred/accepted dogma. Yes, i meant dogma. The original DGU Kleck 1993/4 Survey was published in 1995 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology It clearly generated additional research studies, dueling studies. In following up the details it appears the DGU numbers range from 2000-3000 up to 4.5 million per year. Even i don’t believe those multi million numbers.

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