Mourning Dove

A friend wrote her congressman asking what was being done to curtail the mass shootings in the U.S.  He (unlike my congressman) wrote back quoting a 2020 study by the Crime Research Prevention Center stating the U.S. had fewer shootings per capita than most other countries.  I found that hard to believe but I've been wrong a few times so thought I'd check out the paper.   Googled the website and found a synopsis of the paper but I wanted to see the data so downloaded the paper itself.  The authors said their primary source of information is the University of Maryland Global Terrorism Database but then went on to say the authors had changed the criteria a bit and done a lot more research on their own.   Their compiled results are in  Table 1: Countries with Mass Shootings from 1998 through 2017;Ranking by per 100,000 capita rate of attacks.   The U.S. was #66 (better than Haiti but worse than Iran).  That's out of 101 countries.  Many countries were missing - Ireland, Spain, Botswana, Uraguay, Mongolia, Australia - another 94 countries in all.  The researchers didn't include them because they could find no attacks which met their criteria.  It's misleading though to not include them as part of the total ranking of countries.  Add them them in and suddenly the U.S.'s rating shows more shootings than most other countries.    FYI: the top six countries on the list were: Northern Mariana Islands* followed by Afganistan, Iraq, Central African Republic, Solomon Islands**, and Somalia. Interestingly, China was at the very bottom of the list (i.e. had the fewest attacks) having 0.000 shootings per 100,000 population and they have some of the most restrictive gun control measures of all nations.   My guess is the congressman doesn't care about facts as much as shutting up those annoying constituents who want action so there aren't more mass shootings like Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Farmington, Dallas, Yuma, Adelanto, Columbus, Chico, Philadelphia, Maili, Dadeville, Fort Wayne, Park Forest, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, ...

* Northern Mariana Islands is part of the U.S. Commonwealth and follows U.S. federal gun laws.

** Solomon Islands had ethnic conflict until 2003.  After that there was a conserted civilian effort to have guns turned in and destroyed.  The country now has gun laws considered restrictive.