The Invisible Fallacy
One of the things that attracted me to Medium is that it seems to be an echo chamber of misinformation. So many of the writers seem to fancy themselves as original and independent thinkers when they are merely recycling conventional bromides. (The author of the “young white guys are mass shooters” article says that she is riffing on something she heard on NPR.) It is a target-rich environment — to use a phrase that I heard Dick Rutan use at the beginning of the Gulf War — so how can I resist?
For example, I chanced on this article that does a deep dive into why “young white guys” are the “ones committing mass shootings.” We are told by the author:
But still. Why are young white guys the ones susceptible to this?
Let’s face it. If almost all our mass shootings were perpetrated by middle-aged Asian ladies or elderly white women or young Hispanic girls, we’d be right on that pattern.
This week we had two mass shootings by elderly/middle-aged Asian men, but that doesn’t deserve mentioning?
Why not?
Confirmation bias.
The media is constantly emphasizing the “whiteness” of certain mass shooters while turning a blind eye to the African-American mass shooting carnage that comes out Chicago every weekend.
The empirical data is that the racial breakdown of mass shooters is generally consistent with the racial demography of the United States (with a slight edge to African-Americans because of the aforesaid problem with places like Chicago.) I suspect that with the emergence of Mexican Drug Cartel violence in America, we will start seeing Hispanics make up for lost ground.
Mass shootings in the U.S. by shooter’s by race/ethnicity as of January 2023
Published by Statista Research Department, Jan 24, 2023
Between 1982 and January 2023, 73 out of the 139 mass shootings in the United States 73 were carried out by white shooters. By comparison, the perpetrator was African American in 24 mass shootings, and Latino in 11. When calculated as percentages, this amounts to 53 percent, 17 percent, and eight percent respectively.
So, whites are generally underrepresented, and Blacks are slightly overrepresented.
Always question the definition of “mass shooting,” which fluctuates depending on political agenda. In this article, the author is obviously not including the quotidian daily quota of gang violence in her definition of “mass shooting,” except where she wants to drum up a large number to make people believe that they are at risk of a “mass shooting” as if they lived in an inner city neighborhood in Chicago, Detroit, etc.
Of course, this information comes as a wet blanket for those who want to reach broad, facile conclusions about America’s lack of compassion or white privilege, but you have to go with the data before the conclusion.
