Tuesday 13 March 2018

Mass Shooting Stats... and Snopes

This post is based on this article on Snopes.

The article, like many news articles you see on TV or in the newspaper, assumes the average reader can't work numbers. Most of the time, they're right. Most of the time, readers see numbers, assume something about them, and are happy quoting them to their friends to support whatever agenda the original article had.

Sometimes, someone like me gets to have a look.

Have a read of the Snopes article. I'm using their stats that are in the table towards the bottom, and I'm throwing in a couple of other interesting statistics to make a bit more sense of it. Firstly, their table, summarised by country and total mass shooting deaths between 2009 and 2015:
  • Albania - 4
  • Austria - 4
  • Belgium - 10
  • Czech Rep. - 9
  • Finland - 5
  • France - 158
  • Germany - 13
  • Italy - 4
  • Macedonia - 5
  • Netherlands - 6
  • Norway - 69
  • Russia - 12
  • Serbia - 19
  • Slovakia - 7
  • Switzerland - 8
  • UK - 12
  • USA - 199
Now, consider two more things (note: km2 means square kilometres):
  • Area of Europe is 10,180,000 km2; area of USA is 9,833,520 km2
  • Population of Europe is 741,447,158; population of USA is 325,719,178
Yes, those stats are simply pulled from Wikipedia (Europe, USA): feel free to do more accurate research yourselves.

The interesting things to note are that:
  • Europe and USA are roughly the same size (USA is 96.6% the size of Europe)
  • Europe has roughly double the number of people of USA (USA has 43.9% the population of Europe)
This leads to two statistics that the Snopes article does not mention.

1. Looking at the number of mass shooting deaths in relation to the land mass (i.e. Europe should be taken as a whole, due to its size compared with USA, not as individual countries), that would be 345 deaths for Europe (or rather, for 16 countries within Europe, out of almost three time that number in reality). Since USA has 96.6% of Europe's area, that would mean we could expect 333.27 deaths in that time from USA to be on equal footing... but USA only has 199.

This means that, in terms of area, USA is a safer country than the whole of Europe.

2. Looking at the number of mass shootings in relation to population, we could expect USA to have 151.455 deaths... but USA has 199

This means that, in terms of population, Europe is safer than USA, but only just! In terms of population, Europe has 76.1% the number of mass shooting deaths as USA.


Now, also take into consideration the following:

Europe already has very strict gun laws in many countries, and has done for the whole 2009-2015 time period that the above stats are taken from. Surely, given the current debate on USA's gun laws, if gun control really is effective, the mass shooting deaths in Europe should be close to zero... and not over 75% the rate of USA.


The issue with the Snopes article is that it treats countries as equal, especially in terms of population. The stats it shows of the "Annual Mass Shooting Death Rate (per million people)" is criticised when the data is the mean average, stating that the median average would be more appropriate.

This couldn't be more wrong.

Both averages are inappropriate because of the difference in size of the comparisons. If we were to compare each state of USA with each country of Europe, we would have a far better standard for comparison. Europe has small countries like Andorra, Luxembourg, Vatican City, and USA has small states like Rhode Island, Delaware and Washington D.C. would have to be counted as well.

The reality is, travelling from San Francisco to Chicago is not the same as travelling from Paris to Lyon... Paris to Athens is still shorter!

In conclusion, if USA were to impose similar gun control laws to European countries, and assuming every USA citizen (and every illegal immigrant) gave up their guns, the mass shooting death rate would only drop by 25%.

Gun control is unlikely to do much regarding mass shootings.

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