That FBI report that suggested that mass shootings were rising in number? It was wrong, of course.
Jason Riley reports in the Journal:
Last September the Obama administration produced an FBI report that said mass shooting attacks and deaths were up sharply — by an average annual rate of about 16% between 2000 and 2013. Moreover, the problem was worsening. “The findings establish an increasing frequency of incidents,” said the authors. “During the first 7 years included in the study, an average of 6.4 incidents occurred annually. In the last 7 years of the study, that average increased to 16.4 incidents annually.”
The White House could not possibly have been more pleased with the media reaction to these findings, which were prominently featured by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, the Washington Post and other major outlets. The FBI report landed six weeks before the midterm elections, and the administration was hoping that the gun-control issue would help drive Democratic turnout.
But late last week, J. Pete Blair and M. Hunter Martaindale, two academics at Texas State University who co-authored the FBI report, acknowledged that “our data is imperfect.” They said that the news media “got it wrong” last year when they “mistakenly reported mass shootings were on the rise.”
As Riley notes, they basically just made it up. I am looking forward to the prominent exposés from “the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, the Washington Post and other major outlets” . . .
Still, all’s well that ends well:
Ironically, this scare-mongering likely inspired more gun purchases. The Washington Times reported last year that record checks for gun sales hit a new high in 2013: “More than 21 million applications were run through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System last year, marking nearly an 8% increase and the 11th straight year that the number has risen.”
Since liberals like to link violent crime to the proliferation of guns, it is worth noting that, according to the Justice Department, the violent-crime rate in 2013 fell by 4.4% from 2012 and was 14.5% below the 2004 level.
The crime rate keeps dropping. The number of firearms keeps increasing. The laws keep being liberalized. But the talking points remain the same.