I am not interested in giving any serious thought to John Lott or his claims.
Adam Lankford
Professor at the University of Alabama
August 2018
Shock study: U.S. had far fewer mass shootings than previously reported
[Of course not. Liars have no desire for the truth.
Lankford claimed the U.S. has more mass shooters per capita, by far, than any country. And has, what appears to be, a socialist explanation:
Mr. Lankford, who claimed to be the first to attempt a global survey, said his results suggested there was something to the American psyche that left people disaffected when they failed to achieve the American dream. He said they turn to violent outbursts with firearms.
“It may thus be the lofty aspirations and broken dreams of a tiny percentage of America’s students and workers — combined with their mental health problems, distorted perceptions of victimization, delusions of grandeur, and access to firearms — that makes them more likely to commit public mass shootings than people from other cultures,” he postulated in his 2015 paper.
He refuses to share his data and his exact methodology and John Lott, and others, easily find many more mass shootings in the rest of the world that what Lankford claims. This results in:
Mr. Lankford studied the period from 1966 to 2012 using data from the New York City Police Department’s active shooter report, a 2014 FBI active shooter report and some foreign accounts.
He identified 292 incidents worldwide in which at least four people were killed — the FBI’s definition of a mass murder. Of those, 90 were in the U.S. — 31 percent of the total among –Jooe171 countries.
…
Mr. Lott, meanwhile, turned to data from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database and followed up with Nexis and web searches to try to catch cases that the database missed.
He said good data exist only for recent years, so he looked from 1998 to 2012 and found 1,491 mass public shootings worldwide. Of those, only 43 — or 2.88 percent — were in the U.S. Divide that by per capita rates, and the U.S. comes in 58th, behind Finland, Peru, Russia, Norway and Thailand — though still worse than France, Mexico, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Looked at from the number of victims in those shootings, the U.S. again ranks low, with just 2.1 percent of mass shooting deaths, Mr. Lott said.
Lott released his data and even sent it to Lankford. Who, of course, has an agenda to support and is “not interested in giving any serious thought” to it.
They have to lie to even attempt to win, and they know it.—Joe]
Just remember the simple principle: if you aren’t allowed to see the raw data, it isn’t science.
This applies to warmism; it also obviously applies to gun control quacks like this pseudo-professor.
If you aren’t allowed to see the raw data, AND the entirety of the methods and technology used to collect it, they’re hiding something they don’t want you to see, therefore it isn’t anything remotely close to science.
If their results can’t be replicated by anyone, anywhere, using their stated methods, it isn’t anything close to science.
If they’re getting paid via coercive funding (taxpayer subsidies) it cannot possibly anything remotely close to science because government doesn’t fund anything without an agenda.
In fact, very, very little of anything foisted off on us is actual science (possibly nothing, except for the occasional tidbits of truth needed to get you to swallow the greater lies).
If it doesn’t fit some agenda for the power-hungry, it would probably never be presented to you at all, for what would be the point?
If you want the truth then, it is probably best to look where no one else is pointing, at that which everyone else is ignoring. If you find anything, and become enthusiastic about sharing it with others, you will know you’ve found something truly significant, and probably very good, if people immediately get angry and want to kill you upon hearing it.
Ergo; if no one is actively trying to destroy you, or have you killed, if people of position, title and status don’t roil and fume at the sound of your name, you’re probably either nowhere near the truth or you’re failing to spread the message effectively.
Of course the converse is not true; if people hate you and want you dead, that, in and of itself, doesn’t mean you’re close to the truth. You could just be a jerk.
BUT if you are presenting the truth people WILL hate you for it, and if you’re universally admired you’re certainly not bringing the truth.
The truth exposes the lies that our whole political economic and social system (Babylon) is built on, that we all live by, and practically no one wants that.
“[T]here was something to the American psyche that left people disaffected when they failed to achieve the American dream.” This hypothesis (not supported by even a single unreproduceable experiment, it’s a hypothesis, not a theory) would possibly be true if the people performing the mass shootings were older people for whom the American dream, however he defines it, passed them by. That it is so often the young, the hypothesis is supported that it is vanity, as defined by the British author Josephine Tey in “The Singing Sands”; I deserve this because I am me.”
And as pkoning rightly points out, if you aren’t allowed to see the raw data, it isn’t science. This “scientist” (actually a practitioner of Scientism, a religion wrapped in the language and trappings of science) got this data as what we used to say in Cost Estimating as a “PIDOMA” (pulled it directly out of my A$$).
Not merely young people, but more often young people effectively indoctrinated by the left. Thus they feel “disaffected” because they’ve been trained to feel disaffected, for youth is otherwise a time of possibility and hope.
It’s a pretty neat trick, really; incessantly beat the drums of angst, and when it works, when some kid snaps and kills people, then blame America for it. Blame the right to life, blame property rights, blame the right to keep and bear arms;
Blame liberty for the crimes of those most effectively indoctrinated by the enemies of liberty.
You do have to admit that it works, and that it works very well indeed. The whole world is ruled by this process.
By what standard, then, do you criticize it?
I am not interested in giving any serious thought to Adam Lankford or his claims.
Hey. That’s pretty easy.
Or, to quote the most commonly-used phrase in the fire service, “F*ck that guy.”