Why does the U.S. have so many mass shootings?

The use of "lies, damned lies, and statistics" and other creative measures.

Click to watch the video for more info:

It’s easy to find articles claiming the United States is a “uniquely violent” country. The popular story is this is caused by the availability of firearms. Here’s a chart fitting that narrative (that conveniently ignores 85% of countries) :

This might be interesting if there were only about two dozen countries in the world…

A paper on mass public shootings by Adam Lankford received massive national and international media attention. Hundreds of news outlets in at least 35 different countries published his claims. According to Lankford, from 1966 to 2012, an enormous amount of the world’s mass public shooters - 31% - occurred in the United States alone. Lankford’s study reported that from 1966 to 2012 there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and only 202 in the rest of the world combined. Lankford claims to have “complete” data on such shooters in 171 countries to back this up and, of course, attributes this to gun ownership rates. The New York Times published this chart based on his numbers.

Still short of the 195 countries in the world.

However, this study initially received no scrutiny to verify any claims. As a simple example, consider The New York Times chart itself based exclusively and unquestioningly on Lankford’s data, which largely demonstrates no linear relationship between mass shootings and gun ownership rates.

Even the NYT chart with Lankford’s data demonstrates no correlation.

When John Lott investigated further, he found a large amount of counter-evidence and questioned the findings. Using Lankford’s definition of “mass shooting” Lott’s research discovered 3,081 shooters outside the United States in just 15 years during the period that Lankford examined, over fifteen times more mass shootings outside the United States in less than a third of the number of years. Adding that in means the US makes up less than 1.43% of the mass public shooters around the world, much less than the US’s 4.6% share of the world population.

Lott’s data compared:

Other tallies on this:

What was Adam Lankford’s response to this? He wouldn’t address Lott’s tally or offer any of his data, stating, “I am not interested in giving any serious thought to John Lott or his claims.” He also refused to share his “complete” data with anyone else, turning down requests from the Washington Post, Washinton Times, Real Clear Politics, Fox News, among others. Lankford has been questioned by his fellow academics and has not responded to any requests for his data. Professor Paul Rubin of Emory University called Lankford’s paper “faulty research.” Professor Carl Moody at the College of William & Mary called the research “patently absurd” adding that “any academic who refuses to share his or her data for replication purposes deserves to be shunned.”

However, none of that has stopped the media from circulating this. Meta-analysis on gun control studies consistently finds they are lacking: