Taking A Look At White Supremacist Propaganda
I recently encountered this site, https://mass-shootings.info/statistics.php which you can see above. They produced the image featured in the screenshot below and passed it around on social media recently. People posting asked questions like, what is the common theme here,” or posted it as evidence that whites are not a primary cause of mass shootings. See the photo below of just one Twitter thread featuring the image. This is a common white supremacist propaganda tactic, post content that insinuates the message blacks are more violent than whites without directly saying it that way. It is called a dog whistle.
OF course, this site doesn’t publish its data in any searchable form, or downloadable document that can be analyzed. Further, many of the cases featured do not qualify as mass shooters at all. Generally, a shooting has to have at least 4 casualties, meaning killed OR wounded, and has to be in a public place. An even stricter definition, like the one from Mother Jones, restricts it to 4 dead. This site does NOT follow either of these rules at all.
Dating back to at least 2005, the FBI and leading criminologists essentially defined a mass shooting as a single attack in a public place in which four or more victims were killed. We adopted that baseline for fatalities when we gathered data in 2012 on three decades worth of cases. (It is important to note that there have been many similar indiscriminate gun rampages in public places—but resulting in fewer fatalities—that would otherwise be included in our dataset. In that regard, ours is a conservative measure of the problem.)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map/
Take this example, It says he was involved in a domestic disturbance, shot AT several people, and then fled on foot, he was arrested later. No one was killed or seriously injured, contrary to what they claim. Further, the link they provide is broken, you have to google his name to find the case, and what actually happened. His case was not a mass shooting, didn’t even hurt anyone, and yet he is put up on the internet as a mass shooter. Further, from over 600 claimed mass shootings that they reference, his photo is cherry-picked out, because he is black. This is just one example of many on this site.
Further, they claim that there were 638 “mass shootings” in America in 2021 alone. This is a blatant misrepresentation of the data, and they do it in order to bump the number of Blacks committing mass shootings. They show that 75% of perps are black this way. According to the FBI, there were 61 mass shootings in 2021 According to mother jones, which only counts deaths, the total is 6, other figures put it between 60-120 based on the standard criteria of a public place and high casualties. In short, they are dramatically inflating the number of shootings, and they’re doing it to make blacks look bad.
An interesting note is that most of these people are pro-gun, conservatives, but the statistics they use to prove blacks are more violent come from ant-gun sources, sources they would otherwise take issue against and argue with. Trying to prove blacks are violent? Yes, we have 2 mass shootings a day. Want to keep their guns, no, we only have a few a year.
But even if you argue with someone to a point that they admit blacks don’t commit most mass shootings, they will still argue that blacks are more violent than whites. If so I ask, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to increase funding in inner-city, majority-black schools? Are you going to establish proactive social services that help these communities? Will you make mental healthcare free and accessible? Are you going to take radical steps to increase inclusivity, and lower racial tensions? Wait, I’m starting to sound like a “radical socialist” with my reasonable common sense humanitarian solutions. Be careful what data you absorb, and what messaging you see scroll across your feed. Statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics.
The Perspective View 