“You’ve probably heard America has the most mass shootings in the world. It’s often given as a reason for more gun control. But economist John Lott looks intot that claim—and he says it’s a myth—based on one bogus claim,” says John Stossel of John Stossel TV.

While dozens of news outlets, including CNN and MSNBC, reported that America has the most mass shooters in the world, Lott says they are using flawed data by University of Alabama professor Adam Lankford.

So, if there is no evidence to prove that America has the most mass shootings in the world, why would the media and Democrats accept the flawed study without looking into it a little deeper? Could a push for gun control, regardless of the truth be the answer?

According to John Stossel– CNN claimed that “the U.S. has the most mass shootings”. The WSJ reported that “U.S. leads the world in mass shootings.” Nearly every major media outlet, and Former President Obama, said the same.

But the claim is based on just one study, and the author of that study, Adam Lankford, would not release his data to either John Stossel or researchers in the field.

Economist John Lott says that Lankford’s study has many flaws.

Watch, as top economist Jon Lott appears on John Stossel TV where he reveals the flawed data used by leftist media and politicians like Barack Obama to promote gun control. Lott calls Lankford’s study, “academic malpractice.”

The Washington Times reports – John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, crunched the numbers and said his count shows that the U.S. had less than 3 percent of the world’s mass public shootings over a 15-year period.

That is smaller than the 4.6 percent of the world’s population that the U.S. accounts for — and way less than the 31 percent of global mass shooters that Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama, claimed in his widely publicized studies.

“If you fix the data, you get the opposite result from him,” Mr. Lott said. “He has the United States way out there, all by itself in terms of mass public shootings. He’s simply wrong. The United States, when I go through this, ranks 58th in the world in the rate of mass public shootings and 62nd in the world in terms of murders from mass public shootings.”

Mr. Lott said he tried to get Mr. Lankford to disclose his data but the professor won’t share it with him or other researchers, making it impossible to double-check the original claims or to figure out why Mr. Lott’s numbers are so different.

Mr. Lankford’s research, first released in 2015 and presented to the American Sociological Association in 2016, garnered stories from The New York Times, Newsweek, CNN and The Washington Post, among dozens of others, that said it was proof, as CNN put it, that “the U.S. has the most mass shootings.”

Mr. Lott, meanwhile, turned to data from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database and followed up with Nexis and web searches to try to catch cases that the database missed.

He said good data exist only for recent years, so he looked from 1998 to 2012 and found 1,491 mass public shootings worldwide. Of those, only 43 — or 2.88 percent — were in the U.S. Divide that by per capita rates, and the U.S. comes in 58th, behind Finland, Peru, Russia, Norway and Thailand — though still worse than France, Mexico, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Looked at from the number of victims in those shootings, the U.S. again ranks low, with just 2.1 percent of mass shooting deaths, Mr. Lott said.

He has released a 451-page appendix detailing each of the shootings and his thoughts on how he classified it, and he shared his data with other academics, including, he said, Mr. Lankford.

The professor, though, told The Washington Times that he wasn’t going to get drawn into a back-and-forth over the issue.
“I am not interested in giving any serious thought to John Lott or his claims,” he said in response to an email seeking comment.

Another professor, Carl Moody, an economist who studies crime at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, said Mr. Lott got it right.

“When I saw John Lott’s paper, I went to the Global Terrorism Database … and counted the number of mass shootings in the U.S. compared to everywhere else. Lott is right,” he said by email.

Should Americans trust statistics on gun violence used by media outlets and politicians whose only agenda is to take away the right for Americans to bear arms?

 

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