Free Republic

Adam Lankford (2016) claims that the United States accounted for 31 percent of the world’s public mass shooters over the 47 years from 1966 to 2012. After four years of extensive worldwide media coverage, Lankford—in response to our paper (Lott and Moody 2019)—finally made one of his datasets available. In doing so, he revealed that he used a definition of public mass shootings that is inconsistent with those of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the New York Police Department that he had claimed to be following. We find that his dataset does not even follow his own...

Well, it’s another day, and another anti-gun study that’s shoddy . It comes with additional controversy since its author will not release his data or even open himself to questions about his work. In August, the Crime Prevention Research Center’s John Lott took to task an anti-gun study by Adam Lankford, who suggests the U.S. is the mecca for mass shootings, being the epicenter for 31 percent of them ; all of this thanks to our rates of gun ownership. Again, it’s not the criminal’s fault; it’s all about the gun, which apparently has magic powers that forces people...

A strange paradox is emerging in America: Overall violent-crime rates are down, but active shooter events — in which a person is trying to kill multiple people in a populated area — appear to be on the rise, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics. Meanwhile, a just-released study finds that although the United States has just about 5 percent of the world's population, the country has 31 percent of the world's mass shooters. The reasons for these numbers are complex, researchers say, but the data suggest that the availability of guns, and perhaps the American obsession with fame, may...

MSNBC featured author Adam Lankford on Tuesday to wonder about the "message" of the Boston bomber. Was it to "complain about abortion, about taxes?" The guest, labeled a "MSNBC analyst," guessed, "This did happen on tax day in Boston, the place of the Tea Party." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]