This is unrelated to crypto, but equally important. If you’ve seen the news, you know we’ve had another mass shooting at a school in Florida. The media has not only been misinforming the public, but the same talking points we are all too used to hearing are being pumped out by both sides. The focus of this post is to debunk much of this misinformation and to point out that the comments surrounding the race of the shooter are counter productive.
Making school shootings a race issue is just ridiculous. Turning this into an attack on all white males is racist. This is the same kind of shit the Daily Stormer does. You can literally make data say anything you want if you’re extrapolating small subsets of data from a bigger picture. Let’s look at the actual numbers:
Between 1982-2017 there were 95 “mass shootings”. White people were responsible for 56% and black people were responsible for 19%. What needs to be taken into account is that there is not actually a proper definition of “mass shooting”. Most of the time it comes down to the pathology and profile of the shooter or shooters. The 95 number is actually very misleading. If you look at the data itself, the number is actually much larger. You actually have to use death toll and bystanders as a query. There were 358 mass shootings in 2015 alone. A third of these were gang-related drive by shootings in public areas. Another third were related to arguments and the shooters were intoxicated. Some victims were innocent bystanders including small children. 75% of the victims were black. 90% of the shootings took place in heavily impoverished communities, the majority of which were minority communities. That’s just 2015. The truth of the matter is that you’re more likely to be killed in a mass shooting if you’re black and living in a poor black neighborhood. There is a shooting related injury every 4 hours and a gun related homicide every 18 hours in Chicago. I need to calculate my own data since I can’t find it anywhere, but this would of course show that black males commit more or at least equally as many mass shootings as white males. It is important to look through the bias and do your own research. News outlets across the board are very unreliable. My overall point is that focusing on race restricts your ability to think. It narrows your thought process and opens you up to narrative projection, ideology driven confirmation bias, etc.
Another point, when you bring up the data on school shootings, you’ll also find misleading information. A school shooting is defined as any accidental or intentional discharge of a firearm either in a school, outside of a school, or off school property resulting in school property being damaged. The current mantra is that there have been 18 school shootings this year which is correct in terms of this definition. It is of course misleading. There have only been 3 mass shootings in schools this year. This is an example of manipulating data for political reasons. The media engages in half-truths like a conspiracy theorist, and their main objective is narrative projection. This is true for almost all media outlets except a couple. Sometimes all of them will actually tell the truth, but it’s rare and it doesn’t make headlines.
Media misinformation is something I’ve been studying for a long time in my never ending search for a relatively reliable news source. Constantly searching for the truth on my own is very tiring. Chomsky at one time said that the Financial Times was the most reliable source. I would say it and Reason magazine are pretty good. Pro Publica is pretty good too. However, most of the best reporting is done on YouTube via lengthy conversation and the debate in comment section below the video. Joe Rogan hosts a very good show and so does Dave Rubin. You know who is hosting a good show when both sides of the spectrum attack them regularly, but I digress.
Now let’s just talk about mass shootings in terms of “active shooter” scenarios, and compare that to the overall gun-related homicide rate. Between 2000-2013 there were 160 active shooter scenarios. The average isn’t this easy to calculate but for the sake of time, let’s just say that we averaged 12 per year (160 / 13). Total deaths were 1043, so an average of 80 per year. We have averaged around 10,000-11,000 or so gun-related homicides annually since about 1999/2001. That’s about 0.7% of the total number of gun homicides annually. The media is literally narrowing the frame of debate by focusing on the least significant data in order to project a specific narrative supporting their agenda. The same is true of the Democratic party.
There has actually been neuroscience research on why this manipulation is happening. Basically, the more educated and intelligent you are, the more likely you are to manipulate data to match what you already think rather than changing your mind. Only highly intelligent people and those who’ve practiced it and work hard can actually avoid doing this.
The fact of the matter is active shooters are responsible for 0.7% of the gun murders. Only a percentage of those happen at schools. Only 4% of gun related homicides are committed with rifles. Only a percentage of those are committed with so called “assault rifles”. This is all being elevated to an inappropriate level of importance due to its emotional impact—never let a good tragedy go to waste. You can literally predict what will be said by both sides with 100% accuracy.
Honestly, if you wanted to ban something and have the highest probability of reducing the homicide rate, you’d ban handguns. Then again, you’d never be able to control the black market sale of handguns. Most murders are carried out with unregistered firearms by people with a criminal background. Background checks don’t do a whole lot, but they do at least keep people with a criminal history from buying firearms legally. However, nothing can keep a criminal from buying a gun off the street, having someone else buy it for them then sell it to them, etc. Laws have little to no impact on criminal activity. Criminals will always find ways around them or outright break them. This is a truism in our society that continues to be ignored.
—TheFeralTaint (CTOM Admin)
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Sources:
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-study-2000-2013-1.pdf/view
https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-race/