Myth-Busting Monday
MYTH: FBI Mass Shooting Definition
This article was originally published on GVPedia.
Summary:
Researcher John Lott claims in an Econ Journal Watch article and elsewhere to follow the FBI’s definition of mass public shooting when arguing that 61 mass shootings occurred in the U.S. compared to 2,757 mass shootings in the rest of the world between 1998 and 2017.
This is impossible because the FBI does not have a definition for mass shootings. The FBI does however have an active shooting definition.
According to the FBI: “An active shooter is an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” An active shooting can have any number of casualties.
Public mass shootings have a number of definitions. Lott uses a basic definition of four or more killed in a single incident, and then excludes various categories such as terrorism, gang violence, and battles over sovreignty. Lott’s mass shooting definition differs from those of other academics (as the entry on international mass shootings highlights). For more details of other mass shooting definitions, see GVPedia’s Mass Shootings Report.
Lott’s mass shooting dataset is misleading and distorts the common perception of a mass shooting by including foreign attacks with an average of 22 perpetrators.
For more details on international mass shootings, see our entry titled: “MYTH: Americans Do Not Have More Mass Shootings than other Countries”
Lott’s Claim:
In his 2020 book, Gun Control Myths, Lott argues that only a small share of the world’s public mass shootings occurred in the US. Lott claimed in his analysis, “We follow the FBI’s definition of mass public shootings.” The footnote to this claim says the same definition for public shooting was used in Lott and Landis (2001), Lott and Landis (2003), Lott (2010), and the work done by Lott’s Crime Research Prevention Research Center.
In his September 18, 2019 testimony before Congress, Lott also said, “We follow the FBI’s definition of mass public shootings.” He then claims that 2,818 public mass shootings occurred worldwide between 1998 and 2017, only 61 of which occurred in the United States. During this period, Lott claims the U.S. had 4.6% of the world’s population and just 2.16% of the mass public shootings.
Reality:
The FBI does not have a definition for mass shootings, which renders Lott’s claim impossible. The FBI does, however, have a definition for an active shooter incident, but Lott’s definition of what constitutes a public mass shooting is at odds with this FBI definition. Furthermore, Lott’s definition distorts the common perception of a mass shooting.
Lott excludes U.S. mass shootings that are the result of robberies and gang violence, but includes terrorist attacks which make up a greater share of international incidents.
As Lott explains in his 2020 book, Gun Control Myths, his primary data source for international incidents is the Maryland Global Terrorism Database. The result is that Lott excludes U.S. gang shootings and major events like the 2015 Texas biker gang gunfight, but includes incidents such as “300 heavily armed Pokot raiders attacked a village in the Suam subcounty, killing people, burning as many as 200 houses and stealing at least 300 head of cattle.”
Researcher Adam Lankford used Lott and Moody’s own data from 1998-2012 and found that “the United States had more than six times its global share of public mass shooters who attacked alone, and more than any other continent except Asia.”
Lankford argues that Lott and Moody ignore the fact that research consistently shows that public mass shooters almost always attack alone. “They include many forms of group violence in their analyses, such as massacres by hundreds of members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and group attacks by soldiers, uniformed troops, paramilitary fighters, armed rebels, and terrorist organizations.”
Lankford’s analysis finds that more than 95% of the public mass shootings Lott and Moody include from the U.S. were committed by a single perpetrator, and zero incidents by more than two killers.
In contrast, only seven percent of the foreign incidents counted by Lott and Moody involved a solo attacker. Of the foreign attacks where they knew the number of shooters, Lott and Moody’s dataset had an average of 22 perpetrators and a median of four perpetrators per incident.
Sources:
John Lott, Gun Control Myths, 2020
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 and Carlisle E. Moody, “Is the United States an Outlier in Public Mass Shootings? A Comment on Adam Lankford,” Econ Journal Watch, March 2019
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
John Lott and Carlisle E. Moody, “Brought Into the Open: How the U.S. Compares to Other Countries in the Rate of Public Mass Shooters,” Econ Journal Watch, March 2020
Adam Lankford, “The Importance of Analyzing Public Mass Shooters Separately from Other Attackers When Estimating the Prevalence of Their Behavior Worldwide,” Econ Journal Watch, March 2020
GVPedia University, “Mass Shootings in America: 2013-2019,” GVPedia, July 5, 2020
Image via GVPedia.