In an opinion piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, frequent A1F contributor Dave Kopel debunks one of the most nefarious myths perpetrated over the past several months.
Responding to the Las Vegas tragedy, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said, “Already this year, there have been more mass shootings than days in the year.” In his analysis, Kopel explores how Murphy’s likely source—the online Mass Shooting Tracker, which lists 340 such incidents this year—uses a deceptively overbroad definition of mass shootings. In reality, Kopel explains, there are only about 20-22 mass shootings per year, according to the FBI. Moreover, only about four are the sort of random events that receive widespread media attention—most are domestic killings, murders committed during armed robberies and gang killings.
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