Tragedy in Aurora by Tom Diaz & Lonnie Phillips & Sandy Phillips

Author:Tom Diaz & Lonnie Phillips & Sandy Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538123447
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

Public Mass Shootings in Other Countries Compared with the United States

If public mass shootings are truly the “price of freedom” for the United States, then we should expect that citizens of other free countries would be paying the same blood-soaked toll. Certainly at a minimum countries that share the common roots of British constitutional democracies—specifically Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—should be just as deeply scarred by the regular lashings that these shootings inflict on American men, women, and children. Yet they are not. There are good reasons that “perhaps no form of violence is seen as more uniquely American than public mass shootings.”95

Because the globalized civilian gun industry has thrust its militarized tentacles into every crevice in the world, it is sadly true that few countries have entirely escaped public mass shootings. The American gun industry, the National Rifle Association, and other elements of the gun lobby seize upon relatively isolated mass shootings abroad as evidence that even stringent gun control laws don’t work. But, putting aside terrorist attacks like the coordinated November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India,96 public mass shootings with death as their only discernible objective happen in no other country as frequently as they do in the United States. Nor have the governments of other democratic governments been as paralyzed as the United States has been in response to public mass shootings when they occur. In some countries, the types of guns that facilitate public mass shootings were not there to stay.

The most comprehensive and authoritative work on comparing public mass shootings worldwide with those of the United States was done by Dr. Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama. Dr. Lankford has researched in depth mass murder, mass shootings, and terrorism. He has written several books and published an extensive list of academic papers in scholarly journals.97

In 2016, Dr. Lankford published the results of a landmark study that examined the differences among nations in public mass shootings. Using more than forty years of data, he did a “quantitative analysis of all known public mass shooters who attacked anywhere in the world from 1966 to 2012 and killed a minimum of four victims.”98 The study included complete data for 171 countries and found that “they averaged 1.7 public mass shootings per country from 1966 to 2012.”99

So, yes, public mass shootings happen in other countries. And, because the world is so big and there are so many other countries, mass shooters taken in gross are more likely to strike somewhere beyond America’s borders than within them—although not more likely or even as likely in any other given country on the planet than in America.100 But that is only one dimension of the problem. Lankford’s study exposed two facts that should be troubling for ordinary Americans, their friends, and their families. The first is that “firearm ownership rates appear to be a statistically significant predictor of the distribution of public mass shooters worldwide.”101 In simple terms, more guns equals more mass shootings—and America stands head and shoulders above the world in both gross numbers of guns and their rate per capita.

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