FBI Analysis of FBI Mass Public Shootings Report1

8/10/2019 FBI Analysis of FBI Mass Public Shootings Report1

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Report from the Crime Prevention Research Center

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John R. Lott, Jr.

President

[email protected]

484-802-5373

Rebekah C. Riley

Director of Communications

[email protected]

386-717-9210


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Abstract

An FBI report released on September 16th

, 2014 makes the assertion that active shooterattacks and deaths have increased dramatically since 2000 both increasing at an annual

rate of about 16 percent. As the headline in the Wall Street Journal stated: MassShootings on the Rise, FBI says.

But the FBI made a number of subtle and misleading decisions as well as outright errors.

Once these biases and mistakes are fixed, the annual growth rate in homicides is cut inhalf. When a longer period of time is examined (1977 through the first half of 2014),

deaths from Mass Public Shootings show only a slight, statistically insignificant, increase an annual increase of less than one percent.

The FBIs misleadingly includes cases that arent mass shootings cases where no one or

only one person was killed in a public place. While the FBI assures people that itcaptured the vast majority of incidents falling within the search criteria, their report

missed 20 shootings where at least two people were killed in a public place. Most ofthese missing cases took place early on, biasing their results towards showing an

increase.


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Though additional active shooter incidents may

have occurred during this time period, the FBI is

confident this research captured the vast majority

of incidents falling within the search criteria. FBI

Report, page 5

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The FBI report notes (p. 5): Specifically, shootings that resulted from gang or drugviolencepervasive, long-tracked, criminal acts that could also affect the publicwerenot included in this study. In addition, other gun-related shootings were not included

when those incidents appeared generally not to have put others in peril (e.g., theaccidental discharge of a firearm in a school building or a person who chose to publicly

commit suicide in a parking lot). The first paper to use this definition was by Lott andLandes (see John R. Lott, Jr. and William M. Landes, Multiple Victim Public Shootings,

Bombings, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws: Contrasting Private and PublicLaw Enforcement, Social Science Research Network, April 21, 1999

(http://ssrn.com/abstract=161637)). See also John R. Lott, Jr. and William Landes,Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Social Science Research Network, October 19, 2000

(http://ssrn.com/abstract=272929). Some, such as the New York Times, refer to theattacks being studied here as so-called rampage killings. Ford Fessenden, They

Threaten, Seethe and Unhinge, Then Kill in Quantity, New York Times, April 9, 2000(http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/09/us/they-threaten-seethe-and-unhinge-then-kill-in-

quantity.html?pagewanted=all). Politifact and CNN also define these mass shootings inthe same way (see http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-

meter/statements/2014/jun/13/everytown-gun-safety/have-there-been-74-school-shootings-sandy-hook-clo/ and http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/11/us/school-shootings-cnn-

number/).


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Academic advisory board

Chair of the Board: William M. Landesis the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Law

and Economics, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Mr. Landes haswritten widely on the application of economics and quantitative methods to law and legal

institutions, including multiple victim public shootings, hijacking of airplanes, and the bailsystem. Landes has been an editor of the Journal of Law and Economics (19751991) and the

Journal of Legal Studies (19912000), is past president of the American Law and EconomicsAssociation, and is a member of the American Economic Association, the Mont Pelerin Society,

and the Council of Economic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a Fellowof the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Members

J. Scott Armstrongis a professor at the Wharton Business School of the University of

Pennsylvania. He is internationally known for his pioneering work on forecasting methods. Mostrecently, his research activities have involved forecasting for terrorism and conflicts. He is

author of Long-Range Forecasting, the most frequently cited book on forecasting methods. He isa co-founder of the Journal of Forecasting, the International Journal of Forecasting, the

International Symposium on Forecasting, and forecastingprinciples.com. He is a co-developer ofnew methods including rule-based forecasting, causal forces for extrapolation, simulated

interaction, structured analogies, and the index method. In addition to forecasting, ProfessorArmstrong has published papers on survey research, educational methods, applied statistics,

social responsibility, strategic planning, and scientific peer review.

Arthur Z. Berg, M.D.is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association

and former member of the APA Violence Task Force. He was founding Psychiatrist-in-Chief atBeverly Hospital (emeritus) and former Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical

School. A recent article that Dr. Berg had in the Wall Street Journal on multiple victim publicshootings is available here.

Tim Grosecloseis the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA. He holds

appointments in the political science and economics departments at the university. In 1987, hereceived his B.S. in Mathematical Sciences from Stanford University. In 1992, he received his

PhD from Stanfords Graduate School of Business. He is the author of over two dozen scholarlyarticles as well as the book Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.

Given the extensive media bias on guns, Professor Grosecloses expertise on identifying mediabias will be important. He contributes to the blog, www.Ricochet.com, and is an active tweeter at

@Tim_Groseclose (https://twitter.com/Tim_Groseclose). You can learn more about him and hiswritings at www.timgroseclose.com.

Jonathan M. Karpoffis the Washington Mutual Endowed Chair in Innovation Professor of

Finance at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. Karpoff has publishedpathbreaking research on the topics of corporate crime and punishment as well as corporate

governance. He is the associate editor for the Journal of Finance, Journal of FinancialEconomics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Management Science, Managerial

and Decision Sciences, and The North American Journal of Economics and Finance. He hasreceived a long list of academic awards.


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Joyce Lee Malcolmis the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and the SecondAmendment at George Mason University Law School. She has a Ph.D. in history and is

internationally known for her books Guns and Violence: The English Experience, HarvardUniversity Press (November 24, 2004), and To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an

Anglo-American Right, Harvard University Press (March 2, 1996). Guns and Violence

provides a comprehensive history and examination of changes in murder rates in England fromthe middle ages to the current day. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and she hasheld positions at Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and

Cambridge University. Malcolm also served as the Director, Division of Research Programs forthe National Endowment for the Humanities during 2005-2006.

Scott E. Mastenis Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy in the University ofMichigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business, where he has been a faculty member since 1984.

A leading scholar in the area of transaction cost economics, Professor Mastens research focuseson issues at the intersection of law, economics, and organization. In addition to his primary

appointment, he has held appointments as the Louis and Myrtle Moskowitz Research Professorin Business and Law at Michigan, John M. Olin Faculty Research Fellow at Yale Law School,

John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia Law School,and Visiting Professor in the University of Michigan Law School. He was President of the

International Society for New Institutional Economics in 2008-09, is a co-editor of the Journal ofEconomics & Management Strategy, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Law,

Economics & Organization and Managerial and Decision Economics

Carl Moody, Professor of Economics, William & Mary. Professor Moody has publishedextensively on the relationships between guns, crime and imprisonment in such academic

journals as Criminology, Homicide Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal ofLegal Studies, and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. He teaches mathematical economics

and econometrics.

J. Mark Ramseyeris the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard UniversityLaw School. Prior to coming to Harvard, Mark held tenured positions at the University of

Chicago and UCLA and visiting positions at such places as the University of Tokyo, Universityof Virginia, Tel Aviv University, and University of Haifa. Among the vast array of topics that he

has studied, he is an expert on the Japanese legal system including criminal law. In the field ofcriminal law and procedure, he has studied the relation between prosecutorial behavior,

prosecutorial budgets, and conviction rates; the structure of the Japanese judiciary and its effecton the adjudication of politically charged cases; the relation between judicial background and the

imposition of the death penalty; and the relation between court structure and conviction rates.

Paul H. Rubinis the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University, andEditor in Chief of Managerial and Decision Economics. He has been president of the Southern

Economic Association. His research interests have included crime, the death penalty, and guncontrol. He received his B.A. from the University of Cincinnati in 1963 and his Ph.D. from

Purdue University in 1970. He is a Fellow of the Public Choice Society, a Senior Fellow at theProgress and Freedom Foundation, an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and

the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, and former Vice President of the Southern EconomicsAssociation. Dr. Rubin has been Senior Staff Economist at President Reagans Council of

Economic Advisers, Chief Economist at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission,


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Director of Advertising Economics at the Federal Trade Commission, and vice-president ofGlassman-Oliver Economic Consultants, Inc., a litigation consulting firm in Washington.

Documents

FBI Analysis of FBI Mass Public Shootings Report1