Annals of Derp: Deadlier by the Dozen

Image by Kaioden/DeviantArt.

On the awful shooting of Alison Parker and Adam Ward in Roanoake, the Vixen and a whole series of important posts by Steve. There's nothing for me to say but to repeat that we need better gun control and better mental health care, both.

Oh wait, someone's speaking up for the white murderers who always get called racists after they kill black people, and yet nobody's calling this BLACK GAY killer of white people names, what's up with that, Gunga Dinesh?

A-and speaking of white killers who are always getting called racists...

Via Addicting Info.

That quote from Obama's speech  yesterday afternoon raises a remarkable question: Does Obama read Tom Engelhardt? Because he echoes a recent headline of Tom's,

In U.S., Domestic Terror, Cop Killings and Violent Gun Deaths with Suicides, Dwarf Anything "Jihadis" Have Produced

That would be so great. Maybe their reading tastes overlap a little, which would still be pretty cool. Anyway the president is not an ignorant baboon but a much better informed person than George Zimmerman, or else Zimmerman is using "dwarf" with an unusual meaning.

YEAR	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
US deaths from Islamic terrorism*	19	5	4	2	8	7
US gun deaths**	31,347	31,672	32,351	33,563	33,636	not yet available

*From the Islamophobe website The Religion of Peace, numbers funky (including a great deal of what looks to me like domestic violence within Muslim families and not terrorism at all by any normal definition) and not well documented.

**From University of Sydney School of Public Health, includes homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths.

While we're on the subject of Ignorant Babooons...

Unlovely chart from Politifact last June purporting to show that Obama is Mostly False in claiming that mass murder of the Charleston type "doesn't happen in other countries", or,  immediately afterwards correcting himself, as he does (haters gonna hate, writers gonna revise), "doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency":

Mass shootings in 11 countries, 2000-2014, from research by Jaclyn Schildkraut and H. Jaymi Elsass cited in the Politifact article seems to show that the US death rate (per 100,000) from such killings is not that high, a little less than that in Switzerland and considerably less than Norway and Finland; but there's some very high-quality derp in those figures.

They are distorted, in the first place, by the fact that your Nordic mass murderer is far more efficient than others: your American shooter kills about 3.66 people per attack, or 7.5 killed and wounded altogether; whereas the dauntless Finn offs 9 per incident and inflicts an average of 20.5 casualties (well, out of two incidents), the ferocious Swiss murders an average 14 per incident and 32 total casualties (in their single incident), and and the extraordinary Norwegian murders an average 67 and kills-plus-wounds 100 respectively (obviously that's just one incident too); so that if American mass killers have such a mediocre rate it's because they're hopeless amateurs.

But basically, they are really distorted by the fact that although Obama's final formulation was that these incidents don't happen elsewhere "with this kind of frequency", Politifact did not ask what kind of frequency that was; they asked, rather, with what kind of frequency people get hurt in such attacks, which isn't the same thing.

If you ask for raw frequency scores, you find that mass killing in Finland happens on an average of 0.14 times per year; that is there is less than a 14% chance in any given year that they'll have one or a very safe though not certain bet that it won't; while the Swiss and Norwegians score an annual mass killing rate of 0.07 times per year. But for the US the average number is 9.5 mass killings per year over the past 15 years, meaning about a 100% chance in any given year that there will be lots of them.

Another way of looking at it is to note that for the countries at the low end of the scale, with just one, two, three, incidents, you can hardly tell whether they represent a pattern or merely chance. Germany, with its six incidents, is the only one that is in any way comparable to the US, but its rate is vastly lower.

Or let us add to the European states listed all of the 25 EU countries that had no mass murders between 2000 and 2014, including Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Czech Republic, Portugal, and so on, to make a single unit that is roughly comparable to the US, with a total population of 507 million (plus 13.2 million for Norway plus Switzerland, which are not EU members), and 12 mass shootings over the period, an average of rather less than one per year, or less than one tenth of those in the US. Or, since the European gunmen are so much more thorough than ours, 156 deaths compared to the US 487, or 297 total casualties next to the US 992. Now you see where we're going?

Not only do the frequency numbers absolutely bear out Obama's claim, as shown, the number of casualties per 100,000 is drastically different when you compare apples to apples instead of raisins: 0.029 deaths from mass shootings per 100,000 as compared to 0.15 for the US, or about a fifth as many, and 0.057 dead plus injured per 100,000 in Europe, next to 0.31 for the US, or about a sixth.

Or leaving out Norway (with its single rightwing terrorist monster shooting up a socialist youth camp in what he regarded as an act of war) and Switzerland and sticking to the EU proper, 10 mass shootings in 15 years, and 75 deaths total, that's 0.015 per 100,000, exactly a tenth of the US rate, and 165 total casualties, or 0.0325 per 100,000, a smidgen over a tenth.

Thus by any standard you care to name, mass murder is indeed far rarer in Europe than in the United States, and Obama's claim was entirely corrrect.

Politifact knows it too, but covers up the knowledge with unseemly fudge:

We heard from several of you regarding Obama's use of the word "frequency," and that frequency could refer to the incidents of mass shootings, not deaths.... We agree that there is no preferred comparison and each is valid, and we've changed some language in this article to reflect that. We also agree that China has a larger population than the United States, a fact we weren't initially clear about but have since fixed.

What does that mean, "we agree there is no preferred comparison"? Agree with whom? Not with me, my argument is that Politifact's comparison is irrelevant to the question. There are comparisons that test the hypothesis and comparisons that don't. Politifact's is one of the latter.

Beyond hilarious, by the way, if you don't mind my saying so, that you set yourselves up as experts on anything when you "weren't clear" China has a larger population than the United States until some commenter pointed it out to you. "We also agree"! By God, you'd better! as Thomas Carlyle said.

Also,

we are sticking with our rating of Mostly False, in large measure because of Obama's claim that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries." That is incorrect. 

Obama "also agrees" that his first formulation is inaccurate. He fixed it in the sentence immediately following, revising it to say that the violence was rare, not nonexistent. In holding him to the original sloppy statement and basically ignoring the instant correction (even though their original post is mostly devoted to the failed attempt to disprove it), Politifact is exhibiting astounding bad faith. As much as in using a sample of all the countries that had mass shootings (except Azerbaijan and Argentina) in the period and none of the many more that didn't. As shameless in its way as George Zimmerman, or Mostly Derp.

Bonus factoid: In the first months of 2013, nearly twice as many Americans were killed by US-born toddlers as by terrorists. Fact! Probably not significant, but I'm willing to wait for more data.