Mass Shooting Are Bad Way To Make Policy According To FiveThirtyEight

By Tom Knighton

Mass shootings make headlines. As a nation, we gather to mourn those lost, even though we knew none of the deceased. The sheer scale of horror from a mass shooting like Las Vegas or the Pulse Orlando shooting boggles our mind.

Invariably, calls begin for something to be done. Anything. “We simply have to stop this kind of thing from happening,” someone argues.

Yet, is that really the way forward? I don’t think so, and I’m definitely not alone.

FiveThirtyEight is a site that looks at statistics and makes pronouncements from that. They aren’t always right in their predictions (see the 2016 election, for example), but they’re fair. They manage to make both sides angry from time to time with their work.

Guess who they’re making mad when they say this, though:

Last year, we produced a series of stories on American gun deaths and the people behind the statistics. From that reporting, and other sources, we know mass shootings are different from other kinds of gun deaths in several ways.

First, they’re rare, and the people doing the shooting are different. The majority of gun deaths in America aren’t even homicides, let alone caused by mass shootings. Two-thirds …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms