Science Claims 7% Of Adults Saw A Mass Shooting

A peer-reviewed scientific science study in JAMA said that “In a survey study of 10,000 US adults, 7% reported having been present on the scene where 4 or more people were shot”. That “4 or more” is the official definition of “mass shooting.” That 7%, which they and “the media” made much of, seems mighty high to me. They also said 2% were injured in one of these shootings!

“This study confirms that mass shootings are not isolated tragedies, but rather a reality that reaches a substantial portion of the population, with profound physical and psychological consequences,” senior author David Pyrooz, a professor of sociology and a criminologist at the Institute for Behavioral Science at UC Boulder, told Phys.org…

Respondents were asked: “Have you personally ever been physically present on the scene of a mass shooting in your lifetime?”…

“Our findings highlight the substantial reach of mass shootings in US society. This widespread exposure underscores the need for comprehensive public health strategies to address the broad and enduring impacts of mass shooting exposure,” researchers wrote in the paper.

Let’s see if this makes sense.

Wokepedia says there were 586 “mass shootings” in the USA in 2024. I have no idea if that’s right, but suppose it is. I also don’t know how many people are present at “mass shootings”. Suppose it’s 100. That seems high to me for an average number—some would have had more people but most would have fewer, I’d guess—but a high number is in favor of the authors.

That means, for only the year 2024, roughly 58,600 people witnessed a mass shooting. There were some 340 million souls milling about in that year, by official count, of which about 78% are adults. Which means something like 58,600/265,200,000 = 0.022% witnessed a mass shooting. Which is less than 7%. And if everybody, I mean all 100, were injured, we get the same number: 0.022%.

But the authors of the paper “Direct Exposure to Mass Shootings Among US Adults“, David C. Pyrooz and others, mean not over one year, but a lifetime. If folks didn’t get lucky in 2024, perhaps they did in 2023 or 2022 and so forth.

Here it get trickier. Wokepedia also says mass shootings peaked around the Year Of Floyd, and were much fewer in previous years. Statista has these estimates:

There is also this key note: “Since 2013, the source defines a mass shooting as any single attack in a public place with three or more fatalities, in line with the definition by the FBI. Before 2013, a mass shooting was defined as any single attack in a public place with four or more fatalities.” So these are fatalities and not number of incidents. Also, 2024 is only a partial year here.

Rockefeller Institute, on this definition, said there were 441 total mass shootings since 1966 to 2020. With fatalities as the key in the definition, there is no possibility of coming anywhere close to 7%.

CNN has their own estimates of shootings, the veracity of which is up to you. They also have the shooting and not fatality definition, with a peak around the Year Of Floyd. But they also show that before 2020 the rates were half what they became, with a low of 272 events in 2014, the earliest year they report.

There do not seem to be official statistics on mass shootings, by either definition, much before 2014. However, some loose compilations exist. Wokepedia has counts. In 1999 there 8 in total, in 1998 there were 6, and the like for earlier years.

The story seems to be this: a peak of about 600 in the Year Of Floyd and each year since (but dropping), half that from 2010 to 2020, and much fewer in previous years. This accords with memory, too. This is important because the total figures in the numerator of our calculation of how many people ever witnessed a mass shooting.

We could do this more precisely (and for homework, you should), but let’s paint the best case for our authors, to get a rough upper bound on how many people could have witnessed a mass shooting.

You might guess an 80 year old had more chances over his lifetime to see a mass shooting than a 20 year old, and so on. According to our scientific authors, only 3.88% of their sample was old folk, a bit more than half were Baby Boomers and Gen X, with the rest younger. Which means those with the better on average chances of seeing a mass shooting in their lifetimes were not a large part of their sample.

But again, let’s be generous. If everybody in their sample had 50 years to witness a mass shooting (a few had more, and about half had less), and if we suppose the peak of 600 events for each of those 50 years (much in favor of the authors), and a population of 340 million for each of those years with 78% adults (it would have been smaller earlier, of course), then our calculation is:

(50 years x 600 shootings per year x 100 people at each event) /265.2 million = 1.1%.

Which is still a lot less than 7%.

Now 50 years ago, there were only about 216 million people, and about 168.5 million adults. Smaller denominators make larger percentages. But there weren’t anything like 600 mass shootings in that year: maybe 5 or 6; call it 10. And 10/168.5 million is 38 times smaller than 600/265.2 million (even assuming 200 events in 1975 is still twice as small as 600/265.2 million). So assuming the larger population for each year is still heavily in their favor. And don’t forget the number of people in their sample alive then was only about half. We’re really boosting them here.

The older should have reported more events over a lifetime, as we said, but they show (in their eTable 3) short-lived Gen Zers reported 7 times more events the long-lived Boomers-Silent folks! Of course, the young are more prone to violence. But their sample was under 15% from Gen Z.

Conclusion? Their 7% is stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins. It cannot be believed. Something closer to 0.05% to 0.1% is much more likely. That latter number is 10 times the rate for just 2024, which was just off a peak year. The best case for the authors is that only Gen Zers saw a mass shooting: there are 69.1 million of them, with maybe 54 million of them adults, and if we take their last 10 years with 600 events a year with 100 people at each event, which we know is an over-estimate, we get 1.1% witnessed a shooting. The authors report 13.6% for this age group.

After we read the entire paper, all this makes sense. It’s dumb. The authors lose no chance to cram in idiotic non-scientific asinine emotional terms like “systemic racism” and are anxious to everywhere capitalize “black”. Nobody I know, including our authors, takes lying into account with surveys. Hard to do, of course. But with a subject like this it had to be expected.

The authors did “discover”, golly, blacks are more likely to have reported being at an event. But since blacks are, as the FBI consistently has shown, about 10 times more violent than whites, this is no surprise. And is not explained by “racism”, but by the violent nature of blacks themselves.

It would make an interesting Masters thesis, which would get you canceled, to do these statistics properly, separating out blacks from others. I wouldn’t bet against that 7% being closer to the mark for younger blacks. But there’s no chance even a 10th of that estimate is true for whites.

Given our long experience with science, my guess is that this 7% will be passed around as gospel, much the same as it used to be reported 5 out of every 4 women at college are raped, and the like. For a while, each time it comes up, we’ll point back to articles like this post, or make the arguments anew. But we’ll grow weary since it’s always a lot more work to show why the number is goofy than to just parrot it.

That’s why nonsense is so easily spread. And why truth is always a slog.

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