by Glenn Beck
And you can’t blame a regional quirk, either. The year the ban took place Massachusetts had a murder rate that was roughly 70 percent of other states in the Northeast (New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire). But now? Homicides in Massachusetts are 125 percent of the average of those other states.
If all of this data doesn’t do it for you, then there’s another response to those who say that none of these bans are good tests, a response that is more about common sense than studies and stats: if those who proposed these bans expected violent crime rates to increase, why didn’t they warn us in advance?
THE UNITED STATES IS UNIQUE IN SUFFERING FROM GUN MASSACRES.
“[I]t’s so unbelievable. And it only happens in America. And it happens again and again. There was another shooting yesterday. Three people killed, I think in a hospital. We kill people in schools. We kill them in hospitals. We kill them in religious organizations. We kill them when they’re young. We kill them when they’re old. And we’ve just got to stop this.”
—MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, December 22, 2012
“No other country in the world has the problem that America has with gun massacres.”
—RACHEL MADDOW, January 11, 2011
Because America has the most guns, many people seem to believe that multiple-victim public massacres are an exclusively American phenomenon. But that’s simply not the case. Most of the countries in Western Europe, for example, have much tougher gun laws than the United States, but have experienced many of the worst gun massacres in history. (By the way, you’ll notice that, whenever possible, I do not use the term “shooter” or “mass shooting” when talking about these events. I believe those phrases have been co-opted by people who want to paint everyone who shoots a gun with the same broad stroke. I won’t play that game. Those who hunt or use their guns for sport are “shooters”—those who kill innocent people with them are murderers and glory killers.)
In 2011, a thirty-two-year-old man visited the island of Utoya, Norway. There, in a place where his victims couldn’t shoot back, he murdered 69 people and injured at least 110. This remains the worst massacre ever committed by a single person. In Mumbai, India, on November 26, 2008, 164 people were killed and another 308 wounded when terrorists wielding machine guns and grenades invaded hotels, a train station, and a Jewish cultural center. Both of those massacres eclipsed anything that has occurred in the United States.
Up until the attack in Newtown, Connecticut, the three worst K–12 public school massacres in the world had all occurred in Europe. The worst occurred in 2002 in a high school in Erfurt, Germany, when eighteen were killed. The second-worst was the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, in which sixteen kindergartners and their teacher were killed. The third-worst, with fifteen dead, happened in Winnenden, Germany. (By the way, most of the mass murderers I reference did what they did to be famous. I refuse to give them that satisfaction and will not mention their names in this book.)
When guns aren’t as easily available, psychopaths often turn to other weapons. In 2009, a twenty-year-old man armed with a knife and a hatchet attacked a day-care center in Belgium, where he hacked and stabbed two adults and thirteen babies. Two nine-month-old babies and one day-care worker were killed. Media reports state that the killer dyed his hair red and was obsessed with the Batman movie The Dark Knight. He committed the massacre on the one-year anniversary of the death of Heath Ledger, the actor who played the Joker in that movie.
In 2008, a thirty-seven-year-old man entered an elementary school in Osaka, Japan, armed with a kitchen knife. He murdered eight children and seriously wounded thirteen other kids, along with two teachers.
Throughout the three-year period 2010–2012, a series of attacks on elementary schools and day-care centers were committed in the People’s Republic of China using knives, cleavers, hammers, axes, and box-cutters. China has suppressed and censored much of the news about these attacks—partially to prevent copycat crimes, and partially to protect themselves from intense national horror and embarrassment—but here are a few that we do know of:
2010
—A forty-one-year-old man stabbed an unknown number of students in an elementary school. Eight were reported to be killed.
—A thirty-three-year-old man stabbed sixteen students and a teacher in an elementary school. Death toll unknown.
—A forty-seven-year-old man stabbed twenty-eight students, two teachers, and one security guard in a kindergarten. Most of the students were four years old. Death toll unknown.
—A man (age unknown) armed with a hammer attacked children in a preschool. He then committed suicide by dousing himself in gasoline and setting himself on fire. The number of injured and killed is unknown.
—A forty-eight-year-old man, armed with a cleaver, attacked a kindergarten class, where he murdered seven children and two adults and injured eleven others.
—A twenty-six-year-old man slashed more than twenty children and staff at a kindergarten, killing three children and one teacher.
2011
—An employee at a child-care center (age unknown), armed with a box-cutter, slashed eight children, all aged four or five. Death toll unknown.
—A thirty-year-old man, armed with an axe, murdered a one-year-old and a four-year-old and four adults who where taking their children to a nursery school.
2012
—A thirty-six-year-old man hacked and stabbed an elderly woman and twenty-three children at an elementary school. It was reported that, due to immediate trauma care in three different hospitals, none of the victims died, although some were seriously injured, with fingers and ears cut off.
—A seventeen-year-old man stabbed to death nine people and wounded four others with a knife in China’s Liaoning Province following an argument with his girlfriend.
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.
THEN WHY ARE GUN MASSACRES NOW HAPPENING MORE THAN EVER HERE IN THE UNITED STATES?
“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 o
f 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.
NO MASS KILLINGS HAVE EVER BEEN STOPPED BY SOMEONE ELSE WITH A GUN.
“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 Hig
h 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.”