Myth-Busting Monday
MYTH: Europe and U.S. have similar rates of public mass shootings
This article originally appeared on GVPedia.
Summary:
Researcher John Lott repeatedly claims that the United States and Europe have similar per capita rates of public mass shootings.
Lott’s dataset excludes mass shootings that are the result of robberies and gang violence which are common in the U.S., but includes terrorist attacks which make up a greater share of European incidents, thereby skewing his results.
Based on Lott’s own data, the U.S. has twice the rate of mass shootings compared to Europe, contradicting Lott’s own claim.
Lott’s Claim:
In September 2019, Lott testified before the U.S. Congress, saying that the European countries of France, Norway, Finland, and Switzerland had much higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the U.S.
For example, he claimed France’s rate of mass public shootings was 49.7% higher than the U.S. rate. He further claimed that the U.S. ranks 66th in attack rate and 56th in murder rate from mass public shootings out of 101 countries.
Lott’s testimony comparing European and U.S. mass public shootings appears verbatim in a self-published 2020 paper. That paper updates Lott’s 2018 self-published study of the same name.
In the 2018 version of the paper, Lott’s study of 97 countries found that the U.S. ranked 64th in attacks and 65th in murder. In addition to Norway, Finland, France, and Switzerland, he includes Russia as a European country with at least 25% higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the U.S.
During his February 2016 testimony before the Tennessee Senate, Lott said, “Most people may not realize this, but the rate of mass public shootings in Europe is actually fairly similar to the rate in the United States. There is no statistically significant difference there, either in terms of the rate or fatalities.”
The Facts:
Lott’s claim that the U.S. and Europe have similar per capita mass shooting rates is contradicted by his own data.
His data reports 25 mass shootings in the U.S. between 2009 and 2015. During the same period, Europe had 24 incidents and the European Union had 19. Taking into account population size, the U.S. had a rate of .078 shootings per million individuals. The U.S. rate is double the EU’s rate of .038 and Europe’s rate of .032 per million individuals. This contradicts his claim that the U.S. and Europe had similar mass shooting rates.
Rare events in countries with small populations distort statistical results.
For example, Lott specifically names Norway as a country with a higher rate of mass shootings than the U.S. During the time period Lott chose to study, Norway had a single mass shooting resulting in at least 67 shooting deaths versus 61 mass shootings in the U.S. Due to Norway’s small population, Lott attempts to claim that Norway has a higher rate of mass shootings and more fatalities. This is highly misleading since the U.S. had 60 times as many shootings as Norway.
A 2018 Snopes fact check calls Lott’s claim misleading and says it “uses inappropriate statistical methods to obscure the reality that mass shootings are very rare in most countries, so that when they do happen they have an outsized statistical effect.”
Lott’s dataset is misleading and distorts the common perception of a mass shooting. Lott excludes mass shootings that are the result of robberies and gang violence, but he includes terrorist attacks which make up a greater share of European incidents.
This choice means that the 2015 Texas biker gang gunfight is excluded in his statistics, but the November 2015 Paris attacks, which accounted for more than one-third of Europe’s mass shooting fatalities, are included.
Lott told the Washington Post Fact Checker that “If you are going to compare the U.S. to someplace else, if you are going to compare it to small countries, you have to adjust for population. Alternatively, compare the U.S. to Europe as a whole.”
Researcher Adam Lankford used Lott and Carlisle Moody’s own data from 1998-2012 (Moody is an economist at the University of William and Mary) to test this idea and found that “the United States was the site of more public mass shooters who attacked alone than all of Europe, even though Europe has more than twice the U.S. population.”
Lott’s Counter:
In a rebuttal to the ThinkProgress article — coauthored by GVPedia’s President Devin Hughes that initially uncovered Lott’s erroneous claim about the U.S. and Europe — Lott argues that his numbers are accurate:
“The average incident rate per capita for the 28 EU countries is 0.0602 with a 95% confidence Interval of .0257 to .09477. The U.S. rate of 0.078 is higher than the EU rate, but the difference is not statistically different. The average fatality rate for the 28 EU countries is 0.114, with a 95% confidence Interval of -.0244 to .253. The U.S. rate of 0.089 is lower than the EU rate, but again the difference is not statistically significantly.
In Chapter 7 in The War on Guns, I show that from 2009 through 2015 (the first seven years of Obama’s presidency), the fatality rate per million people was 0.58 in the EU and 0.62 in the U.S. The injury rate was 1.316 in the EU and 0.609 in the U.S.”
Rebuttal:
The calculation for the per capita rate of shootings for the U.S., European Union, and Europe as a whole is straight forward: take the number of incidents and divide that by the population. Using Lott’s own spreadsheet (with some slight rounding for populations):
U.S. shooting rate: 25 incidents/323 million = .078 per million
EU shooting rate: 19 incidents/508 million = .038 per million
Europe shooting rate: 24 incidents/743 million = .032 per million
It is unclear how Lott arrives at an EU incident rate of .0602 incidents per million as he does not show his work, but one plausible explanation is that he is adding each country’s incident rate, and then dividing by the number of countries within the EU.
This approach however skews the results substantially (and is not the same thing as the EU incident rate), as it treats each country within the EU as having an equivalent population. This biases the results upwards due to small countries such as Norway having a high per capita shooting rate due to their small population.
Sources:
John Lott, “What type of gun control will actually make us safer?” Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of the United States House of Representatives and the Senate, Senate website, September 18, 2019
John Lott, “Comparing the Global Rate of Mass Public Shootings to the U.S.’s Rate and Comparing their Changes Over time [sic],” SSRN, January 29, 2020
John Lott, “Comparing the Global Rate of Mass Public Shootings to the U.S.’s Rate and Comparing their Changes Over time [sic],” SSRN, November 12, 2018
John Lott, “US Becoming Safer Compared To Europe In Both Fatalities And Frequency Of Mass Public Shootings: US Now Ranks 11th In Fatalities And 12th In Frequency,” Crime Prevention Research Center, January 12, 2016
John Lott, “CPRC’s Testimony Before The Tennessee Senate Judiciary Committee On Four Bills Dealing With Eliminating Gun-Free Zones,” Crime Prevention Research Center, February 11, 2016
Dan MacGuill, “Does the United States Have a Lower Death Rate From Mass Shootings Than European Countries?,” Snopes, March 9, 2018
Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes, “The GOP’s favorite gun ‘academic’ is a fraud,” ThinkProgress, August 12, 2016
Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Obama’s inconsistent claim on the ‘frequency’ of mass shootings in the U.S. compared to other countries,” Washington Post Fact Checker, December 3, 2015
Adam Lankford, “Confirmation That the United States Has Six Times Its Global Share of Public Mass Shooters, Courtesy of Lott and Moody’s Data,” Econ Journal Watch, March 2019
Image by Andrzej Rembowski from Pixabay.