Thread: Diane Sawyer's Sensationalist Crap

Originally Posted by John Galt

The "conspiracies" section of my brain wonders if the spate of "mass killings" that seem to pop up every other day is really a statistically significant increase in the frequency of such events, or if the media is simply reporting more of them, longer, and with greater fanfare now that there's a possibility the government may do something to get more gun control enacted.

Well, it's definitely a fact that mass killings of this type (massacres, shooting sprees, whatever you want to call them) only account for a small percentage of gun fatalities; the overwhelming majority of shooting deaths occur one at a time, in normal old-fashioned murders, gang shootings, burglaries/robberies gone wrong, and so forth. But of course "Crazed gunman kills sixteen people and himself" makes for a much more gripping news item than "Man kills other man in drug dispute" or "Homeowner shot by burglar" or "Jealous wife kills unfaithful husband" or whatever, so yeah, the media definitely does disproportionately over-report on the mass killings, creating the false impression that they represent a significant portion of gun crime. And the resulting public fears are definitely used to justify silly crap like "assault weapon bans", limits on magazine capacity, etc., because people don't realize how irrelevant that stuff is to 99% of gun crime. The reality of the situation is that if even if stricter gun controls could prevent these occasional shooting sprees (a dubious assumption to begin with), the effect would be that the annual murder rate would fall from ~17,000 people per year to something like ~16,960 people per year. Whoop-de-doo! Not that a few dozen human lives per year are insignificant, but in comparison to the overall murder rate in the US, it really shows you how much of a gap exists between the actual scale of the "shooting spree" problem and the degree of importance that many people assign to it in terms of crime-fighting priorities. Another triumph of fear, hysteria, and emotion over facts; thanks, US media.