Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (6 page)

Mass murders happen with appalling regularity in Mexico, a place with restrictive gun control laws. In 2010, Juárez, Mexico, experienced
at least two gun-related mass killings—
one in February when thirteen people were killed at a party, and another
in September, when eight were killed inside a bar. (Juárez is right across the Rio Grande from
El Paso, Texas, which was recently named the “safest large city in America.”) Obviously, many of these massacres in Mexico are related to drug cartels, but it’s strange how they occur so frequently in places that have adopted restrictive gun controls. It’s almost as though cartel or gang members don’t care about the law.

John Lott, an economist and researcher who has performed some of the most comprehensive research to date about the impact of guns on crime (Lott also helped me immensely with research for this book), has put together a partial list of gun-related mass homicides in Europe since 2001 (see link below), and it’s pretty exhausting to read. You quickly realize that, while those attacks don’t make headlines over here, they are just as heartbreaking and confusing. You also soon realize something else: all of the multiple-victim public massacres in Western Europe, as well as all of those in the United States where at least three people died, have occurred in places where civilians cannot legally bring guns.

For a partial list of cases to show that “it only happens in America” is false see:
http://fxn.ws/ZXBTRa
.

“These shootings are becoming all too common, and it’s too easy for dangerous people to get the weapons that
help them perform mass executions like today’s.”

—REPRESENTATIVE CAROLYN MCCARTHY
(D-NY), December 14, 2012

“Mass shootings are not a new phenomenon in our country. But if it seems like the worst of them are
happening more frequently these days, it’s because that’s true.”

—RACHEL MADDOW
,
December 17, 2012

Actually, no, Rachel, that’s not true. Gun massacres are
not
becoming more common. There is a
perception
that we have a sudden crisis (just as there is a perception that a lot of people watch your show), but perception does not equal reality.

Some of this is human nature. Massacres like the ones in Aurora and Newtown are incomprehensible to most people. Our sense of grief and loss and guilt is so overwhelming—and the media coverage so unending—that our perception of the event is demonstrably altered; the details are seared into our minds. We may not remember much about a gang killing in Chicago or a robbery in Cleveland, but we damn well remember the look on those kids’ faces as they ran out of Columbine.

The massacres that most of us hear about and react to—the Columbines, Virginia Techs, Auroras, and Newtowns of the world—are extremely uncommon events. The left-wing magazine
Mother Jones,
whose data, as you’ll soon see, is extremely suspect, counted sixty-two gun-related mass homicides over the last thirty years, and reported that
a total of 513 people have been killed in these attacks. For comparison purposes—solely to show the rarity of these massacres—
3,696 people were killed in the United States by lightning over the forty-four-year period from 1959 to 2003.

That comparison is not at all meant to diminish any of the victims. It’s simply meant to show why Congresswoman McCarthy is so wrong when she uses the word
common
in the same sentence that she mentions “mass executions.” It’s simply not true.

It is true, however, that mass killings do sometimes appear in clusters. This might just be sheer randomness (airline accidents also have a tendency to feel this way), but it’s likely also due to some copycat effect. The killer from Newtown, for example, was reportedly “motivated by . . . a strong desire to kill more people than another infamous mass murderer . . . . [He] saw himself as
being
in direct competition with . . . a Norwegian man who killed 77 people in July 2011.”

To separate fact from perception, let’s take a closer look at mass murders that involve guns. First, we’ve got to define exactly what we are assessing:
all
gun-related mass killings, or just those
in public places
(the type that usually make headlines and capture the public’s attention).

James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who is an expert on these incidents, recently noted the following:

What is abundantly clear from the full array of mass shootings, besides the lack of any trend upward or downward, is the largely random variability in the annual counts. There have been several points in time when journalists and other people have speculated about a possible epidemic in response to a flurry of high-profile shootings. Yet these speculations have always proven to be incorrect
when subsequent years reveal more moderate levels.

In case people thought that was a little murky, Fox summed up the FBI and police data he’d used to reach his conclusion like this: “
[M]ass shootings have not increased in number or in overall body count, at least not over the past several decades.”

Other experts agree. John Lott focuses on gun-related mass killings that take place in public places, excluding attacks involving gangs. Lott reports that, from 1977 to 2010,
there is even a slight decline in these types of killings. Similarly, Grant Duwe, author of
Mass Murder in the United States: A History,
points to a decline in overall public mass murders,
dropping from 43 total cases in the 1990s to 26 in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Even the National Institute of Justice agrees that these incidents
are simply not a large enough part of the problem to merit the attention we put on stopping them. Their review of the data yielded an even smaller annual fatality number than other experts:

Fatalities from mass shootings (those with 4 or more victims in a particular place and time) account on average for 35 fatalities per year. Policies that address the larger firearm homicide issue will have a far greater impact
even if they do not address the particular issues of mass shootings.

Rachel Maddow, along with most of the others who claim that mass killings are on the rise, never bother to look into the facts. Instead they rely on reports like the one done by
Mother Jones
(which called
mass killings an “epidemic”), without questioning their methodology. But that’s a big mistake, because the
Mother Jones
report does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny, let alone academic standards. For example, the first criterion listed by
Mother Jones
is:

The killings were carried out by a lone shooter. (Except in the case of the Columbine massacre and the Westside Middle School killings, both of which involved two shooters.)

Now, let me reword that into what they really meant to say:

The killings were carried about by a lone shooter. (Except in the case of two school shootings that we randomly included because there was no way we could ever leave Columbine out.)

As Professor Fox pointed out, other important criteria in their approach are also “
hard to defend” or “not necessarily applied consistently.” For example:

Mother Jones
included the 1993 Chuck E. Cheese robbery/massacre of four people committed by a former employee, but excluded the Brown’s Chicken robbery/massacre of seven victims that occurred the very same year, presumably because two perpetrators were involved in the latter incident or perhaps because these gunmen had no prior connection to the restaurant.

The
Mother Jones
methodology was created to ensure that only a very specific set of killings would be generated—a set that fit their narrative about an “epidemic” of these type of crimes. So what happens when you look at the data far more broadly and take into account
all
gun-related mass killings (four or more victims, not including the gunman) that were reported to the FBI by local law enforcement?

Paints a slightly different picture, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s why
Mother Jones,
and those who follow its lead—chose to ignore it.

“In the last 30 years there have been 62 mass shootings.
Not a single one has ever been thwarted by a civilian despite America being a heavily armed country.”

—PIERS MORGAN
,
January 9, 2013

If you take this quote at face value it’s so stupid that it almost doesn’t deserve a response. Of course none of the “mass shootings” were stopped—if they’d been stopped they wouldn’t be called “mass shootings.” It’s like saying that not a single one of the 32,367 traffic fatalities that occurred in 2011 was thwarted by seat belts or air bags or speed limits. Yeah—no kidding, that’s why they’re fatalities.

What Morgan’s circular argument leaves out is the fact that many homicides that easily could’ve turned into massacres
have
been stopped by others with a gun. You don’t hear much about these incidents because they either never happened or they never reached the “mass” level of four or more victims. The local media might cover the incident, but when there’s no grisly crime scene, no shaken friends or parents to interview at their most vulnerable time, no feeding frenzy about what kind of gun it was or how many bullets the magazine held, the national media loses interest fast.

The
Mother Jones
“guide” to mass killings in America (which is very likely where Piers Morgan gets his
statistic of “62 mass shootings” from) includes only incidents where at least four people were killed (not including the gunman) in one location. This definition ensures that any incident used in the study is, by definition, a mass killing that was not stopped. What that definition leaves out, of course, are all the times when someone was stopped before they could kill anyone, or after killing fewer than four people. If you don’t think that has ever happened, keep reading.

On April 20, 1999, the country sat stunned as the Columbine massacre unfolded right in front of our eyes. Most people remember exactly where they were when it happened—it was a “JFK assassination” moment for a new generation.

But I guarantee that almost no one remembers where they were nearly eighteen months earlier, on October 1, 1997.

On that day a sixteen-year-old boy slit his mother’s throat, grabbed her rifle, put on a trench coat, and left for Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi. When he arrived he headed for the courtyard and began to fire,
hitting nine of his fellow students and killing two.

Police say that the killer’s plan was to leave the high school and drive to nearby Pearl Junior High School to start shooting again. But as the boy left the school and began to drive his car through the parking lot he was confronted by a Colt .45 pointed through the windshield. Stunned, the boy crashed his car. The man with the gun, Vice Principal Joel Myrick, held it to the boy’s head, point-blank. “Why are you shooting my kids?” he asked him.

Myrick, who’d run to his truck to retrieve his gun as soon as he’d heard the shooting start, held the killer at gunpoint until police arrived. The boy was later found to have
thirty-six rounds still in his pockets.

No one knows how many lives were saved by preventing the boy from making it to the other school, and no one knows whether the two kids who were killed could’ve been saved had Myrick’s gun been closer. But we do know that this incident never reached “mass” status and therefore never captured the attention of the media, the public,
Mother Jones,
or Piers Morgan.

Ten years later, on Sunday, December 9, 2007, a twenty-four-year-old man showed up at the Christian “Youth with a Mission” training center in the Denver suburbs and murdered two teenagers.
He then drove south to Colorado Springs, site of the New Life megachurch. Like a movie theater, the church was densely packed with a huge crowd of people.

In the parking lot
he immediately opened fire, killing two teenage sisters. Then,
armed with a rifle, two semi-automatic handguns, and a thousand rounds of ammunition, he entered the church. In a Web post found after the incident, the killer had written, “All I want to do is
kill and injure as many of you [Christians] . . . as I can.”

But that was not going to happen. Someone was ready for him.

Jeanne Assam, a volunteer security guard for the church, was carrying a licensed handgun and quickly confronted the gunman. When he didn’t comply she shot him several times until he went down. He then shot himself in the head, putting an end to the attack. According to Pastor Brady Boyd, “
she probably saved over 100 lives.”

But the New Life Church and Pearl, Mississippi, mass-killings-that-weren’t are not the only ones ignored by people like Piers Morgan, who desperately want people to believe that guns have never stopped a would-be mass killer.

In 1998, a fourteen-year-old boy took his father’s .25-caliber handgun and brought it to a Friday night junior high school dance at a local banquet hall in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. On the restaurant patio, he shot a science teacher in the head, killing him. Next, the killer went into the hall and
fired several shots, wounding two students. The restaurant’s owner,
James Strand, grabbed his shotgun, followed the boy out, and persuaded him to surrender. Strand held the boy for another ten minutes until the police arrived.