The Numbers

Sunday 16 December 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

We need to look at objective reality by the numbers, not what we want to believe.

Even before Portland and Newtown, we saw a former student kill seven people at Oikos University in Oakland, Calif. We saw gunmen in Seattle and Minneapolis each kill five people and then themselves. We saw the midnight premiere of ‘‘The Dark Knight Rises’’ at a theater in Aurora, Colo., devolve into a bloodbath, as 12 people died and 58 were wounded; 24-year-old James Holmes was arrested outside.

And yet those who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common.

‘‘There is no pattern, there is no increase,’’ says criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston’s Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.

[. . .]

Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.

Chances of being killed in a mass shooting, he says, are probably no greater than being struck by lightning.

Something tells me that the “reality based” party of “science” will completely disregard objective reality, however, in their zeal to curtail the rights of others so that they might feel like they’ve Done Something.

2012-12-16  »  madlibertarianguy