Around the same time that the media was focused on the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton,
60 people were shot in Chicago over the weekend. 24 of those people were
shot in four hours.
Baltimore reached its 200th murder victim of the year during its “Ceasefire Weekend”.
4 people were
killed in 4 days in Kansas City. 6 men were shot in Philly during the filming of a rap video.
Even in Toronto, 15 people were wounded in shootings over the weekend. Over
350 people have been shot this year in the Canadian city which has gun control, no NRA, and none of the usual excuses.
This tide of violence has received less media coverage because it challenges the false claim that, as a CNN op-ed once put it, mass shootings are a “white man’s problem.”
"I would say our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country," Rep. Ilhan Omar claimed on
Al Jazeera.
"We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men," Don Lemon had previously claimed on CNN.
"White Men Have Committed More Mass Shootings Than Any Other Group,"
Newsweek had argued.
The perception that mass shootings are a “white man’s problem” lingers around the country because white mass shooters tend to get more publicity. And, the twisted young male who goes on a public shooting spree fits a certain kind of media narrative. But when we actually study the mass shootings that took place in 2019, it’s clear that Patrick Crusius and Connor Betts are not the norm, but aberrations.
Mass shooters have no particular ideology. Crusius and Betts were opposites ideologically. (Though both cared deeply about the environment.) Nor are mass shooters a white problem or a black problem. Over the same bloody weekend, William Patrick Williams, who is African-American, appeared in court after
being arrested by the FBI for planning to shoot up a Texas hotel with an AK-47 rifle.
Looking at the data from the
Mass Shooting Tracker, widely utilized by the media, as of this writing,
of the 72 mass shooters, perpetrators in shootings that killed or wounded 4 or more people, whose race is known, 21 were white, 37 were black, 8 were Latino, and 6 were members of other groups.
51% of mass shooters in 2019 were black, 29% were white, and 11% were Latino.
Three mass shooters were Asian, two were American Indian and one was Arab.
These numbers are if anything vastly understated. As many as half of the mass shootings that took place in 2019 thus far remain unsolved, but they often took place in black areas and claimed black victims.
White people make up 61% of the country’s population, followed by Hispanics at 17.8%, and African-Americans at 12.7%. In that context, white people are actually dramatically underrepresented among mass shooters, as are Latinos, while African-Americans are highly overrepresented. But that may be because Latino gangs, like MS-13, are less likely to use handguns in public shootouts. And white organized crime groups, like the mafia, no longer carry out attacks like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
