Even in the wake of the horribly criminal Dec. 14 Connecticut shooting and other “public shootings” this year — like the Aurora theater and the Sikh Temple in Milwaukee — Northeastern University’s James Allen Fox says, “there is no pattern, there is no increase.”
Fox, who has been studying such crimes since the 1980s, says the incidents seem more prevalent because of media attention. Conversely, the one’s which receive the heightened “attention are the rarest.”
In other words, the shootings are news because they’re news — their rarity, together with the emotional draw, makes them front page material for days on end. In turn, Fox says a shooting like the one in Connecticut tends to make people panic, which gives the media more readers and viewers (for a time).
Yet Fox says that most people who die as a result of a shooting “knew the identity of their killer.” And those stories, because far more common than a public crime of Friday’s magnitude, go largely unreported.
Fox’s thesis is supported by Minnesota Department of Corrections criminologist Grant Duwe, who not only says public shootings aren’t increasing — they are actually on the decline, historically speaking.
Of course, none of this will affect Sen. Feinstein’s (D-CA) plan to push an assault weapons ban on “day one of Congress” next year. And that’s because facts don’t matter when it comes to furthering the gun-grabbing agenda of the Democrat Party.
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