Let me just address one additional point that has come up several times in the comments, which is the argument that demographically white people aren’t misrepresented among mass shootings because they are “68% of the public and 47% of the shooters”.
Well, that’s just all wrong.
First of all it’s not 47% of the shooters, it was 47 incidents out of 81 and that’s 58%, not 47%.
Secondly it’s not white “people” who are the shooters, it’s white men. Every incident has involved a man with only 2 women participating ever. And those two women, Tashfeen Malik in San Bernadino and Amanda Miller in Las Vegas, were both acting in coordination with their respective husbands — consequently men were there every single time, so the proper demographic group to look at is white men, not white people. Instead of 68% were really talking about 32% or so of the public being responsible for 58% of the mass shooting incidents.
But wait, it gets worse.
All of these incidents were not alike, some had more casualties and some had fewer casualties. If we look at the victims, which was Mr. Jones original point, there were 838 people killed in all these events, 561 of them were killed by white men so the correct number would be that 32% of the demographic public is responsible for 66.9% of the mass shooting victims.
And if that stings, now you know how it feels when people blather on and on about “black on black” crime involving an active shooting gang war without knowing the first thing about the real numbers.
Muslims, even after the most deadly mass shooting in history are only demographically responsible for 9.6% of the victims. [Sure we could bring up 9/11 which was over a dozen years ago and has nothing at all to do with Daesh, but then we’d have to bring all in the bombings of gay bars, women’s clinics, the Atlanta Olympics, Oklahoma City, the Tuskegee Experiment, Wounded Knee and the terrorist history of the KKK who alone murdered about 4,600 people and who really wants to go there right now?] Now of course Muslim men are much fewer demographically than white men at around 0.45%, so that’s a fair point to make if you happen to truly believe in the dubious concept of “demographic responsibility” but Van wasn’t talking about who is performing at or above the level of their demographic quota — something that just about no one ever does -- he was just arguing the simple point that 66.9% is about 7 times bigger than 9.6% in terms of victims generated by each group.
In the end though all of this is moot because the chance of being a victim of these shootings in any given year as I mention in the comments at 1 out of 13 Million is about twice as less likely than the chance of being struck and killed by lightening (1 out of 6 Million). It’s not really something average people should be walking around worried about happening to them. It doesn’t happen every day, it doesn’t happen every month and only until recently it didn’t even happen every year.
Still it’s not something we should completely ignore either, and if we’re going to try and drill down in the specific root causes we have just as much reason if not more to focus on crazy white guys who kill at 66.9% as we do crazy Muslim guys at 9.6%, but the idea of a “total complete ban” of white guys over it is just as flat out ridiculous as a Muslim ban would because it’s criminalizing the innocent for what some other guys — who have nothing to do with them — might do in the future, maybe.
And none of this addresses murder-suicides which obviously involve a multiple murder and occur about 1,200 times each and every year, not to mention family annihilators who will kill their spouse, their kids, their family, the dog, the cat and even their neighbors if they happen to be within reach at the wrong time averaging about 70 victims per year, which is about 3 times as many victims as mass shootings.
Racial bans and profiling are just going way overboard and also, wouldn’t work. Guilt by association always fails when applied to specific individual people.
