By Steve Sailer
12/08/2021
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Straight Shooters
Steve SailerDecember 08, 2021
With mass shootings (such as the high school massacre in Oxford, Mich.) soaring and mass murders (such as the murder-by-car at the Christmas Parade in Waukesha, Wis.) back in the headlines, a new study by two Northeastern U. criminologists sheds needed light on this often confused set of topics.
In “Mass Murder in America: Trends, Characteristics, Explanations, and Policy Response” in Homicide Studies, James Alan Fox and Jack Levin analyze all 448 mass murders from 2006 to 2020 and dispel some of the stereotypes that have clouded thinking upon these gruesome subjects.
They define a mass murder as an event that kills four or more (not including the assailant if he winds up dead), and by any method. …
In contrast, a mass shooting is usually defined as a gunfire incident with four or more people wounded and/or killed.
Thus, the recent school shooting was both a mass murder (four dead) and a mass shooting (eleven struck), while the Waukesha attack was a mass murder (six dead and 62 hurt) but not a mass shooting.
Got that?
… Mass shootings are much more common than mass murders (two dozen times more so in 2021), but individual mass murders get far more publicity, especially if the shooter is white and uses a long gun. …
Blacks are about fifteen to twenty times more likely per capita than the rest of the population to carry out mass shootings. …
According to Fox and Levin, the black share of mass murderers is only about half as bad as the black share of mass shooters: 38 percent black versus 42 percent white, 12 percent Hispanic, and 6 percent Asian.
But that’s still pretty bad: The black mass murder rate is more than four times the white rate, according to an analysis of Fox and Levin’s data by @BostonTea84. …
Read the whole thing there.
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