President Obama commented on the shooting in San Bernardino on Wednesday in an interview on CBS News, “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world.” Ironically, he made his statement on the day after he arrived back from Paris, the site of the November 13 terrorist attack that killed 130 people. France, which has strict gun control, has had five terrorist attacks in 2015, and Europe has seen seven in total, and the year’s not over yet.
The president needs to check his facts before attempting to scare the American people into enacting more gun laws. Two data sets disprove his claim — one from the FBI and the other from Grant Duwe, a criminologist at the Minnesota Department of Corrections and author of Mass Murder in the United States: A History.
After reviewing both sets of data, James Alan Fox, an expert of mass murders who teaches criminology at Northeastern University, says they show “a great volatility in the numbers. There’s no solid trend.”
If there is one pattern evident, it is the president’s automatic kneejerk reaction to such events: stricter gun control.
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
