An oft-repeated lie of the gun-hating Left is that mass shootings are far more prominent in the United States compared to anywhere else in the world because everyday American citizens have the constitutional right to own guns. But as it turns out, the data most frequently presented to back this bizarre claim is patently false.
Adam Lankford from The University of Alabama is the individual behind said data, with a paper he published back in 2013 claiming that countries with strict gun control don't have nearly as many mass shootings as the U.S. But when others attempted to replicate these findings, they were unable to come to the same conclusion.
As reiterated by the far-Left rag Mother Jones, Lankford's study claims that, between the years of 1966 and 2012, there were 90 "public mass shootings, defined as shootings that killed four or more victims." Of the 170 other countries that Lankford looked at, he claims that "only four even made it to double-digits: The Philippines had 18 public mass shootings, followed by Russia with 15, Yemen with 11, and France with 10."
It would seem, based on these numbers, that the U.S. does, in fact, lead the pack in terms of mass shootings. But are these numbers accurate? Not according to an alternative assessment, which found that Lankford had "missed, or completely ignored, thousands of mass shootings that occurred throughout the world during the time-frame in question," to quote Awr Hawkins from Breitbart News.
Leftist claims of mass gun violence throughout America are fake news
After trying unsuccessfully to obtain and examine for himself the sources behind Lankford's study, John Lott from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) set out to try to replicate Lankford's study. What he ended up finding is that Lankford's data is completely skewed to make it appear as though the U.S. is some kind of extreme, gun violence war zone.
On December 4, Breitbart News published the results of Lott's follow-up research, which demonstrated that the U.S. "is not even in the top 50 in the per capita frequency on the list of countries that witnessed mass shootings from 1998 to 2015." And unlike Lankford, Lott is offering full transparency for anyone who wishes to validate his sources.
"Many journalists and researchers asked Lankford for his data. Not only did he refuse to share a list of his cases, or even the number of shootings he found in each country – which are nowhere in his paper. He refused to share an explanation for how he found those cases. That's academic malpractice," explains Lott in a video published to television personality and pundit John Stossel's YouTube account.
"When asked if he used foreign languages to search for these shootings, Lankford stated: '... my data were not limited to English-language searches.' When asked what languages he used, Lankford refused to provide that information. 'This is all the assistance I can provide at this time,' Lankford said," Lott added.
On the other hand, Lott is an open book to anyone who's interested in seeing where he obtained his data, which shows that the U.S. is far down on the list of countries with high rates of mass shootings.
"Unlike Lankford, we took a lot of time to find all the foreign cases we could," Lott says. "We even got translators to identify cases using the same definition of mass public shooters that Lankford used ... and we found that he grossly undercounted foreign attacks."
"We counted well over 3,000 shooters – at least 15 times more shooters as Lankford claimed. Of the 86 countries where we've identified any mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranked 62nd. Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and Russia are European countries with significantly higher rates of murders from mass public shootings."
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