The Economist: America Averages One Mass Shooting A Day
On August 1, The Economist claimed America averages one mass shooting a day, and they countered the impulse to use a gun to defend oneself from mass shooters by suggesting “the impulse to self-defense… is natural, but mistaken.”
How did The Economist arrive at the conclusion that America averages one mass shooting a day? They do it by relying on the same study CNN’s Fareed Zakaria relied on when he said one mass shooting a day is “almost literally true.”
The study was put forward by Shooting Tracker, a group that defines a mass shooting as an incident “when four or more people are shot in an event, or related series of events, likely without a cooling off period.” Do there have to be fatalities? No. Do there have to be critical injuries? No. Just gunshot injuries, period. This method of discerning what is or isn’t a mass shooting is completely at odds with the common threshold of requiring homicides in order to consider an event a mass shooting.
Follow Larry Elder on Twitter
"Like" Larry Elder on Facebook
