boedicca
Uppity Water Nymph from the Land of Funk
- Feb 12, 2007
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Sorry to harsh the "crisis not going to waste" for the gun control freaks, but mass shooting are not increasing.
As Howard B. Unruh barricaded himself in his home against the police -- after finally running out of ammunition -- he got a call from an assistant city editor at a local newspaper who had looked up his phone number.
Why are you killing people? asked the editor, Philip W. Buxton.
I dont know, Unruh replied. I cant answer that yet. Ill have to talk to you later. Im too busy now.
It was 1949 in Camden, N.J., and Unruh had just killed 12 people and injured four others with a Luger pistol, including women and children.
Although some indications suggest the American public has reached a breaking point after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting -- yet another tragic mass shooting in a particularly tragic year -- such attacks have long been a part of American history, and some experts say they are happening not much more often than usual.
"There is one not-so-tiny flaw in all of these theories for the increase in mass shootings," James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, wrote for Boston.com in August. "And that is that mass shootings have not increased in number or in overall body count, at least not over the past several decades."
Fox cited a particularly broad set of FBI and police data that counted shootings between 1980 and 2010 in which four or more people were killed: The average pace was about 20 mass murders per year, with a death toll of about 100. Casualty counts fluctuated wildly -- some years would have almost 125 dead, but then be followed by a year with fewer than 50 mass shooting fatalities. Far steadier was the number of attacks, which usually stayed at fewer than 25 per year....
2012 is tragic, but mass shootings not increasing, experts say - latimes.com
As Howard B. Unruh barricaded himself in his home against the police -- after finally running out of ammunition -- he got a call from an assistant city editor at a local newspaper who had looked up his phone number.
Why are you killing people? asked the editor, Philip W. Buxton.
I dont know, Unruh replied. I cant answer that yet. Ill have to talk to you later. Im too busy now.
It was 1949 in Camden, N.J., and Unruh had just killed 12 people and injured four others with a Luger pistol, including women and children.
Although some indications suggest the American public has reached a breaking point after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting -- yet another tragic mass shooting in a particularly tragic year -- such attacks have long been a part of American history, and some experts say they are happening not much more often than usual.
"There is one not-so-tiny flaw in all of these theories for the increase in mass shootings," James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, wrote for Boston.com in August. "And that is that mass shootings have not increased in number or in overall body count, at least not over the past several decades."
Fox cited a particularly broad set of FBI and police data that counted shootings between 1980 and 2010 in which four or more people were killed: The average pace was about 20 mass murders per year, with a death toll of about 100. Casualty counts fluctuated wildly -- some years would have almost 125 dead, but then be followed by a year with fewer than 50 mass shooting fatalities. Far steadier was the number of attacks, which usually stayed at fewer than 25 per year....
2012 is tragic, but mass shootings not increasing, experts say - latimes.com