Eeyore
Regular Member
I followed a link from a story about the Oregon shooting to USA Today's Behind the Bloodshed http://www.gannett-cdn.com/GDContent/mass-killings/index.html#title
This is a worthwhile read given how much the topic is likely to be discussed in the coming days/weeks. This appears to be some thorough, non-hysterical research. I didn't see much overt bias or idiotic factual errors and they generally were clear on how they were defining terms (although they did attribute 0.4% of mass killings to "automatic weapons" without providing details). There's some uncomfortable truths for both sides of the debate in there.
My take-aways included:
This does nothing to dissuade me from my opinion that the root cause of the mass shooting problem is how many crazy people and felons are wandering around. I believe we are reaping the results of laws that make involuntary commitment for mental illness nearly impossible and the revolving door court system. Guns have been around for 400 years, mass shootings much less so.
This is a worthwhile read given how much the topic is likely to be discussed in the coming days/weeks. This appears to be some thorough, non-hysterical research. I didn't see much overt bias or idiotic factual errors and they generally were clear on how they were defining terms (although they did attribute 0.4% of mass killings to "automatic weapons" without providing details). There's some uncomfortable truths for both sides of the debate in there.
My take-aways included:
- their timeline shows that these events have been pretty stable/consistent over recent years (no big increase/decrease)
- 77% of mass killing involved firearms, which means 23% didn't
- about half of them are people flipping out and close killing family members
- the perpetrators of crimes that resulted in mass killings were usually repeat offenders
- nearly all of them involve people with a previous history of mental illness and/or criminal offenses
This does nothing to dissuade me from my opinion that the root cause of the mass shooting problem is how many crazy people and felons are wandering around. I believe we are reaping the results of laws that make involuntary commitment for mental illness nearly impossible and the revolving door court system. Guns have been around for 400 years, mass shootings much less so.