I checked out the link, and I’m not going to try to say that those things did not happen since a somewhat random sampling of the source links would suggest that they did.
However, that same random sampling would also suggest that the vast majority of the incidents on this list appear to be either drug or gang related.
Lets talk about the definition of “mass shooting”
Cribbed from the excellent @therevenantrising , and this next section of text references 2015, but we’ll get to 2016 in a bit
The Anti-Gun Claim That There Have Been Over 350 Mass Shootings In 2015 Alone Is Still Absolute Bullshit.
Well, buckle up buckaroos! Consider this Part 2 to that post, because I have found some more evidence for that ass. So pull up a chair and let’s get started.
Next we have this gem brought to you bywww.TheFederalistPapers.org. This is where it gets really fun. Let’s do this.
GunsAreCool/Reddit has apparently become the go-to source for mass shooting statistics, but is their information accurate?
Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Daily Show and WaPohave all cited the “mass shooting tracker” featured on Reddit’s GunsAreCool forum which says America has seen somewhere in the neighborhood of 353 mass shootings in 2015 alone.
Mere seconds of investigation into this “tracker” proves otherwise.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines a “mass shooting” as an event in which four or more individuals are killed as a result of a shooting. This excludes the shooter, which GunsAreCool includes in their “tracker”.
Going by that definition, are Reddit’s statistics accurate?
Not by a long shot. Let’s take a look at the first seven “mass shootings” recorded by this “tracker.”
None of the first seven shootings qualify as “mass shootings.” Each shooting has a citation leading to a news story about the incident so everyone can confirm it’s not fabricated.
So how many of the 353 shootings listed actually meet the FBI’s definition of a “mass shooting?
22
Out of 353 proclaimed “mass shootings,” only 22 meet the FBI’s criteria of a “mass shooting.”
But let’s not stop there, let’s break down the stories by category. Some of the cases fit into more than one category.
Number Of Stories Where The Shooter’s Death/Injury Is Included In The Death/Injury Numbers:45
Number Of Stories Where The Victims Were Killed By A Family Member/Relative: 23
Number Of Stories Where There Were No Deaths, Just Injuries: 146
Cases That Aren’t Considered Mass Shootings For Reasons Other Than Death Count (Reasons Given Below): 4
Case 9: Murders took place in several different locations with a moderate amount of time between each killing.
Case 111: Police respond to a domestic violence call where they are attacked by a man. (Man did not use firearms in his attack.) Officers shot and killed him.
Case 282: Police confront two men with outstanding warrants, who begin shooting at the officers. Officers shoot back and kill the men. Only two dead are the perpetrators, only two injured are the police.
Case 336: Perpetrator only shot two victims, when the counter says 4. The other two deaths were linked to smoke inhalation after he lit the house on fire.
Number of Shootings That Took Place In A Social Setting (i.e., Party, Concert, Funeral): 114
Number of Shootings That Police Believe To Be Drug/Gang Related: 38
Number Of Drive-By Shootings: 32
Number Of Murder-Suicides: 23
There were several cases in which the facts in the story, and the numbers given on the tracker didn’t match up, such as case 337. The tracker says 5 dead, whereas the article says 5 injured.
So when I use the same site you went to, this is what we get when we sort by the FBI’s own classification system:
12 down from 200.
That is a 94% reduction in the number, using the FBI’s own metrics.
The woman accused of transferring guns used in the Excel Industries shooting spree has pleaded not guilty.
Sarah Hopkins, 28, is charged with knowingly transferring weapons to a convicted felon. Court documents show she and Cedric Ford had a past relationship.
….the gun was illegally obtained, and the 4th person killed was the shooter himself, so that one would fall off the list.
Serrano-Vitorino has had previous run-ins with other agencies.
He was deported to Mexico in 2004. It’s unclear when he returned to the United States, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
By September 15, ICE became aware Serrano-Vitorino had returned to the country illegally after he was fingerprinted at the Overland Park Municipal Court in Kansas.
But ICE mistakenly issued a detainer for him to the wrong sheriff’s office. As a result of the error, Serrano-Vitorino was not taken into custody then.
….so there is no legal way he could have gotten his hands on a gun.
The spokesperson said the .380 semi-automatic handgun Campbell used was owned by Terry Carlson, Lana Carlson’s deceased ex-husband.
Spokesperson Chief Ryan Spurling called Campbell a “career criminal,” someone with non-violent crime convictions in Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wyoming.
As a convicted felon, Campbell was not allowed to be in possession of guns.
So that’s 9. Down from 200.
I’m going to stop here.
If I had the time to go through each one on this list, and I mean the ones that have 3 or less deaths, I’m going to estimate that a lot of those are going to be crimes committed with illegally obtained weapons, people that shouldn’t have been in the country in the first place, and/or gang-related violence, which is just another way of saying illegal gun.
If someone else wants to pick it up from here, you’re welcome to it.
I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.
But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.
There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.
Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?
Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].
Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.
Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.
So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?
All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.
Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.
And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.
Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).
Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.
In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).
What are the murder rates for trans men? Does transitioning to male make you statistically less safe?
I counted an estimate of 4-6 trans men murdered in 2015 and 2016 (depending on whether one extrapolates for the rest of this year or not) for an annual death rate of 2-3. That’s 1/100,000 by the estimates at the top, and suggests a lot of trans men’s deaths are misreported as cis women’s deaths because I’m not believing that number for one second.
If we take ASAB as our prior it suggests that murdered trans men have 1:1 chances of being recorded as trans men. If we take gender as prior the chances are 1:6. I’m leaning more towards the latter because I find it highly unlikely that men who also have the complicating factor of transphobia would not be getting killed as often as other men, and I find it especially hard to believe that trans men would be just as low-risk as cis women.
This does creepy things to the murder rates of trans women. If we assume trans women are 5 times as visible as trans men, we would expect to be missing ~25 murders a year; if trans women are 10 times as visible as trans men, there would still be ~15 missing murders, pushing trans women’s murder rates up by 50-100%. Holy shit. Even a conservative estimate where being trans reduces a man’s murder risk by half, and trans women are 10 times more visible, the real murder rate would be 30% higher when accounting for the expected unrecorded cases.
I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.
But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.
There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.
Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?
Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].
Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.
Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.
So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?
All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.
Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.
And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.
Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).
Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.
In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).
