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Holbrooks
Looking over these pages over the last few weeks, it’s tough to turn to the obituaries and see a larger than usual number of innocent young faces looking back. Mostly victims of tragic car accidents, they’ve been cheated out of so much potential before they ever had a chance.
It is a reminder that the health and well-being of a child faces far greater challenges on a daily basis than those highprofile events that make the national headlines. The good news is that even those risks are quite slim. But that’s no solace to those who loved them, who know immeasurable grief and will always feel their loss.
But that loss won’t have the kind of impact that has politicians clamoring to “do something,” while demanding restrictions on the transport of children in cars. Instead, playing on our worst fears, politicians and the media would have you believe that your children and grandchildren are in constant peril from crazy people with “assault” weapons at school.
But rather than nonstop, unyielding advocacy for the Second Amendment, maybe it would be more productive, if slightly more arduous exercise, to look at the numbers to help nervous parents and gun control advocates alike understand the sheer odds of such a fate ever befalling our kids. Regardless of how we move forward, it’s worthwhile to do so with our eyes open.
In this matter, our best friends are, simply, the odds. Consider that, while the odds of ever being the victim of a mass school shooting are infinitesimal -- statistically zero -- even if you sent a kid off to school at Robb Elementary in Uvalde on May 24, there was a 99.5% chance that your child returned home safely that day.
That’s not to diminish the losses, but the fact is, there is no “epidemic” of mass school shootings. It is an “exceedingly rare event.” Those aren’t my words, but those of far more accomplished researchers at Northeastern University in Boston.
In order to make you feel overwhelmed by the prospect of violence, the media likes to remind us that there have been 27 school shootings this year. But it’s no surprise that, just as I pointed out recently with the “white supremacy as our greatest national security threat” myth, they have to cook the books a bit to get to that number.
One of those 27 “school shootings” was in Illinois, where a kid was grazed by a bullet that was fired when another kid dropped his backpack. That’s a school shooting. Another occurred when a North Carolina teenager was wounded in a school parking lot during a fight over a gun. The school was closed for a teacher workday.
That was just one of 10 shooting incidents out of these 27 that happened on school property, but not inside the school. Many of those occurred after school hours, or in vehicles en route to school. Only four involved anything approaching a Uvalde situation, where someone actually discharged a gun inside a school building. Of those others, there has been one fatality in 2022.
The U.S. has about 150,000 schools, with an average of about 500 students at each. The average kid goes to school about 180 days per year. That’s 13.5 billion times that these kids will go to school during the year without ever facing a maniac with a gun.
To be a victim of a mass shooting, anywhere, you’ve got roughly the same chance of being killed by lightning. That, from a researcher at the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written the definitive history of mass murder in America.
“Mass shootings are exceedingly rare events,” says his report.
The fact remains, accidents remain the greatest threat to children in America. And perhaps with the exception of sitting on the couch with a video game controller, school still remains the safest place a kid can be.
In a country that believes in due process, I don’t think we realize just how difficult it will be to implement the laws that are soon to pass. We don’t arrest people for what we think they may be capable of, and even with “red flag” laws putting the burden on friends and relatives, a shooter sees it as the fulfillment of his twisted dream, and very little can stop him.
But why are these events increasing so dramatically? The dirty little secret is, they’re not.
Over the last 30 years, the year with the highest risk of dying in a mass shooting was in 1994, and it’s dropped since then, again according to Northeastern University. Over our history, mass shootings actually peaked in 1929, when my Dad and his friends were taking guns to school in Nacogdoches County and leaning them in the corner to shoot squirrels on the walk back home.
Currently, mass shootings represent only 0.2 percent of murders, but it is those that get mass media attention. So if we could miraculously eliminate all mass shootings, we still have the other 99.8 percent to deal with that only get attention from local press.
What the media will not address is that the vast majority of those occur in cities where voters continue to put Democrats in charge, including Soros-funded prosecutors. But still, the push from our “leaders” is to punish those of us in areas where murder is almost non-existent, and when it does, a handgun is almost always the weapon of choice.
This is all despite the fact that there are four times more guns in the U.S. than there were in 1999. Overall, the homicide rate has dropped dramatically -- by 50 percent -- between 1991 and 2020, according to FBI statistics.
Is it reasonable to deduce that more guns -- more self-protection devices, as it were, results in a safer public? Depending on which one you trust, three different studies, including one from the CDC, estimate from 500,000 to 3 million crimes are stopped or avoided by intervention from a law-abiding gunowner.
While ignoring these facts, the American left has touted the rousing success of Australia’s gun confiscation program within two weeks that followed a mass shooting of 35 in 1996. I remember it well. Australia made the same kind of emotion-driven snap decisions that typically accompany a period of national mourning and outrage.
Australia’s program was dramatic. It included prohibiting semi-automatic rifles, raised age requirements, and made the licensing process more strenuous, including forcing its citizens to demonstrate a “genuine need” for a weapon. For those who make it that far, a gun safety course is required.
The buyback program netted the Australian government about 650,000 weapons. By ratio, the same program in the U.S. would fetch multiple millions. Even if that were possible, there would still be more illicit, unregistered guns on the street than the total number of legal guns during the 90s.
But did it work in Australia? After Uvalde, the American media trumpeted a Rand Corporation study that gave us the “fact” that gun deaths in Australia plummeted after the program was initiated. But that was the headline because most people only read those. The devil was in the details.
Buried in those “facts” was that, in no less than five Rand Corp. studies between 2015 and 2018, the homicide rate in Australia, even with 650,000 fewer guns, did not decline in any statistically significant way. The University of Melbourne deducted that “there is little evidence that the gun buyback program had any significant effect on firearms.”
The British Journal of Criminology claimed that “the gun buyback and restrictive legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicides in Australia.”
But Joe Biden said that these shootings just don’t happen in the rest of the world like they do in the U.S., you say? Well actually, they do. This is the same guy who’s trotted out no less than 10 times that we can’t own a cannon. Lewis & Clark had a cannon, as well as a gun that could shoot 30 rounds without reloading. Some high schools have cannons.
We have people who own tanks, and they know how to drive them.
As for the general worldwide crime rate, research quoted by the Chicago Tribune deducted that “from 1998 to 2015, the U.S. made up 1.49 percent of all murders worldwide, 2.20 percent of the attacks, and less than 1.15 percent of mass public shooters. All these are much less than the U.S. share of 4.6 percent share of the world’s population.”
Of the 97 counties in the mass shootings Hall of Shame, the U.S. ranks 65th in fatalities. Among European countries, Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland, and Russia all had at least 25 percent higher per capita murder rates by mass public shootings.
The trick our mediacrats uses is that they never adjust populations to include per capita crime stats, the only way of assuring any accuracy. So you’ll never know that you have a 4.3 percent better chance of dying downrange of a mass shooter in New Zealand.
By the way, why is it that those orchestrating the big gun grab are actually facilitating the flow of weapons at the border, and arming Ukrainian citizens?
Granted, the facts are never as interesting as mass murder, or the media coverage that follows. But the Biden Administration, the media, and academia have necessitated a virtual cottage industry in factchecking. Fordham University history professor Saul Cornell told the media that the AR-15 is “200 times more deadly” than the rifles used in the American Revolution.
Only when he was pressed by the National Review’s Kevin Williamson did this go-to “expert” admit that his actual comparison was between the Revolution’s muskets and World War II-era fully automatic machine guns, using much more powerful ammunition. The AR-15 had not been created yet.
Cornell says he can’t remember how he came up with his figures -- generally the hallmark of a careless liar. He was still wrong about the 200x lethality rate for WWII anyway. Even with machine guns that could fire up to 1,200 rounds per minute, it’s closer to 50x.
According to his faculty page, Cornell is... ahem, the former director of Fordham’s Second Amendment Research Centre.
Rather than simply accept what you’re told about anything from these people and wait for the fact-checkers, it’s safer and more productive to assume that they’re lying to you to further an agenda. Then you can do your due diligence and try to prove that they’re not.
The fact remains, accidents remain the greatest threat to children in America. And perhaps with the exception of sitting on the couch with a video game controller, school still remains the safest place a kid can be.
