Before the 2014 election, the FBI claimed that mass shootings were
up. False.
By*JASON L. RILEY*
June 9, 2015 7:28 p.m. ET
Last September the Obama administration produced an FBIreport that
<http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/U-_ActiveShooter13B_FBI.pdf>
said mass shooting attacks and deaths were up sharply---by an average
annual rate of about 16% between 2000 and 2013. Moreover, the problem
was worsening. "The findings establish an increasing frequency of
incidents," said the authors. "During the first 7 years included in the
study, an average of 6.4 incidents occurred annually. In the last 7
years of the study, that average increased to 16.4 incidents annually."
The White House could not possibly have been more pleased with the media
reaction to these findings, which were prominently featured by the New
York Times <http://quotes.wsj.com/NYT>, USA Today, CNN, the Washington
Post and other major outlets. The FBI report landed six weeks before the
midterm elections, and the administration was hoping that the
gun-control issue would help drive Democratic turnout.
But late last week, J. Pete Blair and M. Hunter Martaindale, two
academics at Texas State University who co-authored the FBI report,
acknowledged that "our data is imperfect." They said that the news media
"got it wrong" last year when they "mistakenly reported mass shootings
were on the rise."
Mind you, the authors did not issue this mea culpa in the major news
outlets that supposedly misreported the original findings. Instead, the
authors published it in ACJS Today
<http://www.acjs.org/uploads/file/ACJS_Today_May_2015.pdf>, an academic
journal published by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. "Because
official data did not contain the information we needed, we had to
develop our own," wrote Messrs. Blair and Martaindale. "This required
choices between various options with various strengths and weaknesses."
You don't say.
John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center---who has studied FBI
crime data for three decades---told me in an interview that the FBI
report is better understood as a political document than as a work of
serious social science. For example, the authors chose the year 2000 as
their starting point "even though anyone who has studied these trends
knows that 2000 and 2001 were unusually quiet and had few mass
shootings." Data going back to the mid-1970s is readily available but
was ignored. How come? Over the past 40 years, there has been no
statistically significant increase in mass shootings in the U.S.
Another problem with the study: The data used seemed selectively chosen
to achieve certain results. The researchers somehow "missed 20
mass-shooting cases," Mr. Lott said. "There's one case where nine people
were murdered. You just don't miss that." Also, the omissions helped
create an "upward trend, because they were primarily missed at the
beginning of the period." This, he said, "is disturbing."
Mr. Lott told me that he had reached out repeatedly to the FBI and to
the authors for an explanation after the original report came out, but
none was forthcoming until last week. The Journal recently described Mr.
Obama's tenure as the "least transparent administration in history," and
the White House seems to have no interest in proving its critics wrong.
Following the high-profile mass shootings in 2012 at a cinema in Aurora,
Colo., and an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., the White House
pushed hard for more gun-control legislation. Congress, which at the
time included a Democratic-controlled Senate, refused to act. This
surprised no one, including an administration well aware that additional
gun controls wouldn't pass muster with enough members of the president's
own party, let alone Republicans.
But the administration also knew that the issue could potentially excite
Democratic base voters in a year when the party was worried about
turnout. Hence President Obama's vow in his 2014 State of the Union
address "to keep trying, with or without Congress, to help stop more
tragedies from visiting innocent Americans in our movie theaters,
shopping malls, or schools like Sandy Hook."
Ironically, this scare-mongering likely inspired more gun purchases. The
Washington Times reported last year that record checks for gun sales hit
a new high in 2013: "More than 21 million applications were run through
the National Instant Criminal Background Check System last year, marking
nearly an 8% increase and the 11th straight year that the number has risen."
Since liberals like to link violent crime to the proliferation of guns,
it is worth noting that, according to the Justice Department, the
violent-crime rate in 2013 fell by 4.4% from 2012 and was 14.5% below
the 2004 level.
/Mr. Riley is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor./