On Wednesday evening, a rifle-toting gunman murdered 18 people and wounded at least 13 more in Lewiston, Maine, when he opened fire at two separate locations—a bowling alley, followed by a bar. A manhunt is still underway for 40-year-old suspect Robert Card, a trained firearms instructor with the U.S. Army Reserve who, just this summer, spent two weeks in a mental hospital after reporting that he was hearing voices and threatening to shoot up a military base.
While the other late-night talk show hosts stuck to poking fun at new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Thursday night, Stephen Colbert took his rebuke of the Louisiana congressman to a whole other level.
“Now, we know the arguments,” Colbert said of the do-nothing response politicians generally have to tragedies such as this. “Some people are going to say this is a mental health issue. Others are going to say it’s a gun issue. But there’s no reason it can’t be both.”
Those stats hide what’s truly happening (EDIT: Hide is the wrong word, these stats are deliberately dishonest).
TL;DR: Those stats are listed per capita, and USA is by far the largest country on that list. Statistics have been averaged through 2009-2015 even if listed countries (A lot of them) have only one shooting in the time period. The USA has like a dozen mass shootings in this time period. Multiplie countries are on this list because they had 1 shooting in 6 years and have a population of less than 20million people. It’s deeply dishonest.
Norway is at the top due to the 2011 attack that was incredibly deadly. Norway has a population of 5.4 million people today.
All of these statistics are listed as per capita. So because Norway had an incredibly deadly attack and is a small country compared to the USA, it becomes a clear outlier. The site lists norway as having 1.888 deaths per million people, yearly average from 2009 - 2015. Norway has 5.4 million people today. That’s about 10 people dying to mass shootings a year. But wait! Remember, in 2011, 77 died total in the event but 67 were victims of a mass shooting. That reaaaaally skews that figure. EDIT: It is also the only shooting that contributes to Norway’s Stats in this list.
None of those countries on that list have more than 100 million people today except for the USA (335 million according to wikipedia) (Edit: and Russia, 140 mil). There was a clear choice to massage the data to use per capita to push the message that “the USA isn’t that bad” and it’s still coming up #11.
This is the reason that other sources don’t report these statistics as per capita - they’re incredibly rare, even in the USA. 99.9999% of people will not experience them. This doesn’t change the fact they are terrible tragedies and completely preventable. You can easily see in other, less biased sources that this is a US problem.
I highlighted Norway because it was especially glaringly deceptive, I expect the other statistics have similar problems.
Further edit: Look at the spreadsheet this data is from (Here’s just European countries):
Spreadsheet
THERE IS ONLY ONE MASS SHOOTING EVENT FOR SOME OF THESE COUNTRIES and it’s being averaged over a period of 6 years! LOL. LMAO, even. These countries are not having mass shootings every year like the USA is. These stats are so dishonest. Norway has only the 2011 attack!
The US list is longer than the list of all of europe:
US list
This is the source:
Source for bad data
I appreciate your detailed response, but can you explain why per capita is hiding rather than revealing? To me it only makes sense to look at per capita. If you didn’t, and said the US had way more shootings than Norway, I’d say, “yeah, duh, the US has a lot more people so of course it will have more.” You have to compare to the population or else it’s all meaningless. Maybe you mean something else and I’m misunderstanding.
I was familiar with the one Norway shooting and how that’s an outlier, but I don’t think the article’s argument rests that strongly on that one data point.
It does strongly rest on that one data point. Norway has only one data point for that time range.
Just like Albania, with one data point.
Just like Finland, Italy, England, Germany, Belgium… with one data point. The spreadsheets are images and I’m tired of looking at them (I would prefer the actual spreadsheets obviously). France appears 3 or 4 times I think, it appears the most.
It’s a 6 year average, so the list becomes a list of small countries with exactly 1 shooting in 6 years, vs the 25 mass shootings the USA had in the same time period. It takes only 1 event to make it to the top of the list due to population size.
Notice, Spain isn’t on this list, nor is Poland, etc. Are they truly different than the rest of the countries on this list? Or did they just happen to not have one single shooting in this 6 years?
If the statistician truly wanted to compare US vs Europe per capita, they needed to not split the data up by country (but of course this wouldn’t produce the message they wanted). Basically, using a measure of 6 years is far too small for events this rare. Doing it for a longer period of time might cause problems, too. However, if this was done per year and not over an average of 6 years, the USA would consistently be on the top, except for 2011. Making it per capita and over 6 years is doing a lot of work!