Politics Trump’s support for background check bill shows gun politics ‘shifting rapidly’

This reporter stooped to doing a little research:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/chris...trol-didnt-stop-these-mass-shootings-n2449813

Gun Control Didn't Stop These Mass Shootings

 

So, Trump got his wall, then you'd be in favor of gun control?

 

I don't think anyone is claiming that gun control would eliminate all mass shootings, but that it would likely make them less common.

 

They're not that common.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-truth-about-mass-shootings-and-gun-control/

The mass-murder rate, after declining in the 1930s, increased steadily in the late 1960s along with the overall homicide rate. Yet the media framed mass murder as a new type of crime in the 1960s, just as they would later do with workplace massacres in the 1980s. But in reality, neither was new. Duwe relates the story of the failed real-estate developer Monroe Phillips, of Brunswick, Georgia, who went to an office building with an automatic shotgun and opened fire, wounding 32 and killing six, including the town mayor, over the course of a 30-minute standoff. The year: 1915.

James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, is one of the most prominent critics of the media’s mythology of increased mass murder. His own research shows that the numbers of mass shootings and mass-shooting victims in America have been remarkably consistent: roughly 20 shootings a year, with an average of 100 deaths. The number of shootings fluctuates annually, in spikes, which Fox credits to copycatting or sheer coincidence, but the average has held for 30 years. As awful and horrible as mass murder is, in this period these villains have never killed even 1 percent of the total homicide victims in the country.

Duwe blames media irresponsibility for creating a false impression of rising mass murder: “Because claims makers have relied almost exclusively on national news coverage as a source of data, they have made a number of questionable claims about the prevalence and nature of mass murder since the high-profile cases represent the most sensational and least representative mass killings. And the news media have completed the circle of distortion by disseminating the bulk of the claims that have been made, leading to policies that have targeted the rarest aspects about mass murder.”

And Duwe is not alone in this critique. Criminology studies are filled with criticism of the media for playing up mass murder beyond what the facts justify and ignoring the true causes of death in the United States. Christopher Uggen, a professor at the University of Minnesota, compares mass murder to diseases that attract attention for their horror but kill few, writing that “rare and terrible crimes are like rare and terrible diseases—and a strategy to address them is best considered within the context of more common and deadlier threats to population health.”

 

Someone in this thread just posted that "mass shooting don't happen in countries where guns aren't easily available, including, yes, Australia."

 

Nuanced.

"mass shooting don't happen in countries where guns aren't easily available, including, yes, Australia"

Stated as if a fact. Fact checked and proven to simply not be true.

 

More fact checking.

Australia passed its gun laws in 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Australia



And then you have the media writing stuff like this:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...shooting-since-1996-heres-what-did/340345002/

Australia hasn't had a fatal mass shooting since 1996. Here's what it did

 

Yes you did, and ready, set, set the record straight.

 

So, gun control works in Australia because they don't have Mexican cartels crossing their border, but if we no longer had Mexican cartels crossing our border, gun control wouldn't work here? Or it might work, but you're just not in favor of it regardless?

 

For the purpose of their statistic, they set the necessary death toll at 5 to qualify as a mass shooting.