Is the United States an Outlier in Public Mass Shootings? a Comment on Adam Lankford
Discuss this article at Journaltalk: https://journaltalk.net/articles/5980/ ECON JOURNAL WATCH 16(1) March 2019: 37–68 Is the United States an Outlier in Public Mass Shootings? A Comment on Adam Lankford John R. Lott, Jr.1 and Carlisle E. Moody2 LINK TO ABSTRACT In 2016, Adam Lankford published an article in Violence and Victims titled “Public Mass Shooters and Firearms: A Cross-National Study of 171 Countries.” In the article he concludes: “Despite having less than 5% of the global population (World Factbook, 2014), it [the United States] had 31% of global public mass shooters” (Lankford 2016, 195). Lankford claims to show that over the 47 years from 1966 to 2012, both in the United States and around the world there were 292 cases of “public mass shooters” of which 90, or 31 percent, were American. Lankford attributes America’s outsized percentage of international public mass shooters to widespread gun ownership. Besides doing so in the article, he has done so in public discourse (e.g., Lankford 2017). Lankford’s findings struck a chord with President Obama: “I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn’t happen in other countries.” —President Obama, news conference at COP21 climate conference in Paris, Dec. 1, 2015 (link) 1. Crime Prevention Research Center, Alexandria, VA 22302. 2. College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23187; Crime Prevention Research Center, Alexan- dria, VA 22302. We would like to thank Lloyd Cohen, James Alan Fox, Tim Groseclose, Robert Hansen, Gary Kleck, Tom Kovandzic, Joyce Lee Malcolm, Craig Newmark, Scott Masten, Paul Rubin, and Mike Weisser for providing helpful comments.
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