On Wednesday evening, a rifle-toting gunman murdered 18 people and wounded at least 13 more in Lewiston, Maine, when he opened fire at two separate locationsāa bowling alley, followed by a bar. A manhunt is still underway for 40-year-old suspect Robert Card, a trained firearms instructor with the U.S. Army Reserve who, just this summer, spent two weeks in a mental hospital after reporting that he was hearing voices and threatening to shoot up a military base.
While the other late-night talk show hosts stuck to poking fun at new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Thursday night, Stephen Colbert took his rebuke of the Louisiana congressman to a whole other level.
āNow, we know the arguments,ā Colbert said of the do-nothing response politicians generally have to tragedies such as this. āSome people are going to say this is a mental health issue. Others are going to say itās a gun issue. But thereās no reason it canāt be both.ā
Those stats hide whatās truly happening (EDIT: Hide is the wrong word, these stats are deliberately dishonest).
TL;DR: Those stats are listed per capita, and USA is by far the largest country on that list. Statistics have been averaged through 2009-2015 even if listed countries (A lot of them) have only one shooting in the time period. The USA has like a dozen mass shootings in this time period. Multiplie countries are on this list because they had 1 shooting in 6 years and have a population of less than 20million people. Itās deeply dishonest.
Norway is at the top due to the 2011 attack that was incredibly deadly. Norway has a population of 5.4 million people today.
All of these statistics are listed as per capita. So because Norway had an incredibly deadly attack and is a small country compared to the USA, it becomes a clear outlier. The site lists norway as having 1.888 deaths per million people, yearly average from 2009 - 2015. Norway has 5.4 million people today. Thatās about 10 people dying to mass shootings a year. But wait! Remember, in 2011, 77 died total in the event but 67 were victims of a mass shooting. That reaaaaally skews that figure. EDIT: It is also the only shooting that contributes to Norwayās Stats in this list.
None of those countries on that list have more than 100 million people today except for the USA (335 million according to wikipedia) (Edit: and Russia, 140 mil). There was a clear choice to massage the data to use per capita to push the message that āthe USA isnāt that badā and itās still coming up #11.
This is the reason that other sources donāt report these statistics as per capita - theyāre incredibly rare, even in the USA. 99.9999% of people will not experience them. This doesnāt change the fact they are terrible tragedies and completely preventable. You can easily see in other, less biased sources that this is a US problem.
I highlighted Norway because it was especially glaringly deceptive, I expect the other statistics have similar problems.
Further edit: Look at the spreadsheet this data is from (Hereās just European countries):
Spreadsheet
THERE IS ONLY ONE MASS SHOOTING EVENT FOR SOME OF THESE COUNTRIES and itās being averaged over a period of 6 years! LOL. LMAO, even. These countries are not having mass shootings every year like the USA is. These stats are so dishonest. Norway has only the 2011 attack!
The US list is longer than the list of all of europe:
US list
This is the source:
Source for bad data
I appreciate your detailed response, but can you explain why per capita is hiding rather than revealing? To me it only makes sense to look at per capita. If you didnāt, and said the US had way more shootings than Norway, Iād say, āyeah, duh, the US has a lot more people so of course it will have more.ā You have to compare to the population or else itās all meaningless. Maybe you mean something else and Iām misunderstanding.
I was familiar with the one Norway shooting and how thatās an outlier, but I donāt think the articleās argument rests that strongly on that one data point.
It does strongly rest on that one data point. Norway has only one data point for that time range.
Just like Albania, with one data point.
Just like Finland, Italy, England, Germany, Belgiumā¦ with one data point. The spreadsheets are images and Iām tired of looking at them (I would prefer the actual spreadsheets obviously). France appears 3 or 4 times I think, it appears the most.
Itās a 6 year average, so the list becomes a list of small countries with exactly 1 shooting in 6 years, vs the 25 mass shootings the USA had in the same time period. It takes only 1 event to make it to the top of the list due to population size.
Notice, Spain isnāt on this list, nor is Poland, etc. Are they truly different than the rest of the countries on this list? Or did they just happen to not have one single shooting in this 6 years?
If the statistician truly wanted to compare US vs Europe per capita, they needed to not split the data up by country (but of course this wouldnāt produce the message they wanted). Basically, using a measure of 6 years is far too small for events this rare. Doing it for a longer period of time might cause problems, too. However, if this was done per year and not over an average of 6 years, the USA would consistently be on the top, except for 2011. Making it per capita and over 6 years is doing a lot of work!