Mass gun violence down 48% so far this year, top criminologist says

Mass gun violence this year is down nearly 50% compared to last year, according to James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who manages the Associated Press/USA TODAY mass killing database. “As for crime, it’s: ‘Good news is no news.’ … mass shootings by the Gun Violence Archive definition (4+ shot, dead or survive) are down 48% so far this year,” Fox wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “I call it Newton’s Law of Crime Statistics: What goes up, must come down. Just like the homicide rate more generally, spikes in mass shootings tend to be followed by corrective declines,” Fox told The Center Square in an email. “There really is no epidemic of mass shootings; the epidemic in the level of fear that is way out of proportion with the risk,” he said. He argues that when the media reports hundreds of cases of mass gun violence a year whenever they report on incidents with many fatalities, they give a misleading impression because most mass shootings don’t involve more than one death. David Keene former president of the National Rifle Association, agrees the press misleads the public when it reports on mass killings as if such events often committed with an AR 15-style rifle are typical. “Long guns, including so called assault weapons have never been the real problem; the mentally disturbed and criminals are the problem, but the media demonizes the gun rather than those who misuse it,” Keene told The Center Square. According to FBI crime data, there are more than 10,000 murders a year in the United States, but only a few hundred involve rifles of all kinds including so-called “assault weapons.”

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