These types of posts are so very telling. It shows the writer places differing levels of "evil" to different types of death. In Liberal world, a black death means somehow more than a white death. A Democrat dying is evil, a Republican dying - well **** happens. Blacks killing blacks in Chicago? Ignore...those deaths aren't politically valuable - in fact they are damaging.
And there is the fact that the analysis shows these perceptions to be just wrong. Read 21. Learn.
Mass Shooters Aren’t Disproportionately White
Where the myth came from, and what it gets right and wrong about the demographics of mass killings.
The plurality of mass killers are white. But the notion that white men of privilege are disproportionately represented among mass shooters—indeed, that they make up “nearly all” of them—is a myth.
The myth began to spread in July 2012 after a 24-year-old white man, James Holmes, murdered 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. That summer, a team of researchers at Mother Jones put together a database of rampages in public settings. Among the 62 cases (and 64 total perpetrators) the team reviewed—instances dating back to 1982, in which at least four people had been killed in a public place—44 of the killers were white men and one was a white woman. In total, about 70 percent of the perpetrators in the database were white.
That figure didn’t get much notice until December 2012 when another white man, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, shot and killed 26 adults and children at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. At that point, more people started taking notice of these killers’ demographics. A week after the shooting, Stony Brook University sociologist Michael Kimmel and graduate student Cliff Leek wrote a blog post for the Huffington Post headlined “The Unbearable Whiteness of Suicide-Mass-Murder.” “We need to broaden the conversation” about these crimes, they said, to include the “often unspoken elements” of gender and race. According to their intersectional theory of mass shootings, white men “want to destroy the entire world in some cataclysmic video-game and action movie-inspired apocalypse”—a feeling Kimmel and Leek attributed to the white man’s sense of “aggrieved entitlement.” To support this point, the sociologists claimed 80 percent of the mass murders perpetrated by teenagers over the preceding three decades had been committed by white men.
The notion spread from there. The Washington Post ran an op-ed titled “White men have much to discuss about mass shootings.” Salon declared that “White male privilege kills.”
What those initial Mother Jones numbers showed, though, was that white people weren’t overrepresented among mass shooters. The media outlet had found that roughly 70 percent of the shooters in mass killings were white—certainly a majority. But according to Census Bureau estimates for 2012, whites accounted for 73.9 percent of all Americans. (Keep in mind that the definition of whiteness is both vague and forever changing. In the 2010 census, the “white” category includes those whose families originate in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Mother Jones, for its part, categorizes one Moroccan immigrant killer as “white”; leaves the race field blank for a Turkish immigrant; and describes several shooters of Pakistani, Palestinian, Afghan and Kuwaiti extraction as “other.”)
I’m not sure where Kimmel and Leek got their stat about mass murders perpetrated by teenagers, but that figure, too, wasn’t that far off from U.S. demographics. At any rate, it certainly wasn’t true—as many argued then, and many do today—that mass shooters were “almost exclusively” or “disproportionately” or “nearly all” white. (Mass shooters are disproportionately men, however—more on that below.)
Since 2012, Mother Jones has added 29 more mass-shooting events to its database (and tweaked its definition of the crime to fit with new federal guidelines that placed the threshold at three victims instead of four). In this bigger data set, the proportion of white mass shooters drops down to 56 percent, by my count. Judging by those newer numbers, and the most current census estimate that 76.9 percent of Americans are white, the whites-are-overrepresented-among-mass-shooters meme appears even less accurate. Perpetrators that Mother Jones classifies as Asian make up 7.4 percent of the data set, versus an estimated 5.7 percent of the population, while those MoJo identifies as black represent 17.0 percent of the mass shooters in the database versus an estimated 13.3 percent of the population. According to this data set, then, Asians and black Americans are overrepresented among mass shooters by about the same proportion (a bit more than one-fourth) that whites are underrepresented. This means the population rate of mass shootings by whites (at least according to the tiny sample measured in the MoJo database) is 0.021 per 100,000 people, while the corresponding rate of mass shootings by blacks is 1.7 times higher, at 0.037.
This disparity, which could be thought of as the statistical non-whiteness of mass shootings, is much smaller in magnitude than the one for killings nationwide. Overall murder rates among black Americans are 6.3 times higher than they are for whites, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Another report suggests white offenders made up just 45.3 percent of everyone who committed homicides between 1980 and 2008.*
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There's a lot more to read in the article - if you want to open your eyes. Or you can just continue spouting myths.
