Earlier: Mass Shootings Are Up 72% This Summer Over 2010
From Trace:
It’s almost as if the Racial Reckoning declared after the death of George Floyd on May 25 incited a huge number of mass shooters to violence. (By the way, this is a cumulative line graph that shows the total number of mass shootings so far in the year. Please don’t read it as saying that mass shootings accelerated throughout the year and peaked in December. The bright white line is 2020 and the spectacular kink in the trajectory of 2020 is in late May. The other lines represent 2016 to 2019, but they are unlabeled. I’d guess that the second highest line is 2016.)
When you define a mass shooting as an incident in which four people were struck by bullets, whether dead or wounded, your lists are dominated not by Columbine-type mass shootings with high death to wounded counts, dead or captured white shooters who want their names to go down in infamy, but with blacks with poor marksmanship who intend to lay low at their grandma’s for a few days until the cops forget about it, but who will emerge with a legendary reputation in the ‘hood as a bad mo-fo. For example, MassShootings.info reports that of the minority of 2020 mass shooters who have been charged, 73% are black.
On the other hand, the Mother Jones mass shooters’ database requires 3 fatalities and the name of the shooter to be known, plus it excludes so they miss almost all the Baltimore-style mass shootings: e.g., 2 dead & 8 wounded at block party BBQ, but nobody saw the man who opened fire cuz snitches-get-stitches. So it comes up with the more stereotypical list of mass shooters. Mother Jones brags, not without reason:
We exclude shootings stemming from more conventionally motivated crimes such as armed robbery or gang violence. (Or in which the perpetrators have not been identified.) Other news outlets and researchers have since published larger tallies that include a wide range of gun crimes in which four or more people have been either wounded or killed. While those larger datasets of multiple-victim shootings are useful for studying the broader problem of gun violence, our investigation provides an in-depth look at a distinct phenomenon—from the firearms used and mental health factors to the growing copycat problem. Tracking mass shootings is complex; we believe ours is the most useful approach for studying this specific phenomenon.
Basically, nobody cares when blacks shoot up a black block party or funeral, so Mother Jones’ list is usefully stereotypical.
On the other hand, Mother Jones gave up chronicling their definition of mass shootings on February 26, 2020 when the only mass shooting in 2o2o was the black guy killing five whites he accused of racism at the Molson brewery in Milwaukee. Have there have been any mass shootings since then? Dave Chappelle says no, but nobody else appears to be interested.
