Fitbud
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Mass Shootings have Tripled since 2011
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10-15-2014 10:40 AM |
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BEARCATDALE
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RE: Mass Shootings have Tripled since 2011
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10-15-2014 08:57 PM |
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Fitbud
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RE: Mass Shootings have Tripled since 2011
(10-15-2014 08:57 PM)BEARCATDALE Wrote: (10-15-2014 10:40 AM)Fitbud Wrote:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014...d-research
Because of:
Gun free zones
Bush
Obama
Immigrants
Muslims
Drugs
Mental Health issues
Sample bias
Whatever fitbud's agenda is
My agenda?
I'm flattered that you would think that I did this research and came up with this data.
It's not mine however.
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10-16-2014 02:38 PM |
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jh
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RE: Mass Shootings have Tripled since 2011
Quote:Before I look at the data in detail, I’ll just go through why this analysis should be dismissed out of hand: raw numbers. It is a truism of science that the more narrowly you define your sample and the more you shrink the number of data points, the less reliable your conclusions will be. If you were to analyze all gun shootings and violence over the last thirty years, you’d have hundreds of thousands of data points to base your conclusions on. You could, as I like to say, achieve Victory Through Sheer Data Volume. But when you start parsing the data down further and further, you become more prone to random variation and even bias.
Even if we take Mother Jones’ data at face value, we can see we’re dealing with less than 120 victims every year and frequently less than 20. That’s an awfully small number to be drawing conclusions from. To illustrate why, take the Virginia Tech killings. 56 people were killed or wounded. That is more than all but five entire years in their database. Something like that is simply going to swamp the statistics.
But we shouldn’t even take Mother Jones’ data at face value because it is highly suspect. First, it seems to be based on media coverage, which is not exactly an objective source and almost certainly leaves shootings out (Balko, by contrast, acknowledged this bias in his botched raid map). Everywhere, they make arbitrary cuts to exclude murders that may not fit their conclusions. They limit the sample to lone shooters, but make exceptions for Columbine and Westside. They exclude gang activity and other crimes but include the Fort Hood Shootings, which were an act of terrorism. They require the killings be in public, thus excluding men who murder their families. They require at least four deaths, therefore excluding killings that may have been shortened by intervention. They arbitrarily throw in a few spree killings.
This is simply not a representative sample. It’s cherry-picked to fit a definition, but leaves huge gaping baises all over the place. Mother Jones doesn’t even acknowledge this.
http://michaelsiegel.net/?p=5506
But to be fair.
Reason Wrote:The Mother Jones team does make one reasonable point, in the course of arguing against those of us who aren't convinced mass shootings have been getting more common:
Mother Jones Wrote:So why do we keep hearing in the media that mass shootings have not increased?
This view stems from the work of Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, who has long maintained that mass shootings are a stable phenomenon. ("The growing menace lies more in our fears than in the facts," he has said.) But Fox's oft-cited claim is based on a misguided approach to studying the problem: The data he uses includes all homicides in which four or more people were murdered with a gun. His analysis, which counts the number of events per year, lumps together mass shootings in public places with a far more numerous set of mass murders that are contextually distinct—a majority of which stem from domestic violence and occur in private homes.
http://reason.com/blog/2014/10/16/mother...f-mass-sho
But, then again. . .
Reason, again Wrote:The best alternative measurement that I'm aware of comes from Grant Duwe, a criminologist at the Minnesota Department of Corrections. His definition of mass public shootings does not make the various one-time exceptions and other jerry-riggings that Siegel criticizes in the Mother Jones list; he simply keeps track of mass shootings that took place in public and were not a byproduct of some other crime, such as a robbery. And rather than beginning with a search of news accounts, with all the gaps and distortions that entails, he starts with the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports to find out when and where mass killings happened, then looks for news reports to fill in the details. According to Duwe, the annual number of mass public shootings declined from 1999 to 2011, spiked in 2012, then regressed to the mean.
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10-16-2014 03:50 PM |
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