Control by Glenn Beck Read Free Book Online

particular issues of mass shootings.
    Rachel Maddow, along with most of the others who claim that mass killings are on the rise, never bother to look into the facts. Instead they rely on reports like the one done by Mother Jones (which calledmass killings an “epidemic”), without questioning their methodology. But that’s a big mistake, because the Mother Jones report does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny, let alone academic standards. For example, the first criterion listed by Mother Jones is:
    The killings were carried out by a lone shooter. (Except in the case of the Columbine massacre and the Westside Middle School killings, both of which involved two shooters.)
    Now, let me reword that into what they really meant to say:
    The killings were carried about by a lone shooter. (Except in the case of two school shootings that we randomly included because there was no way we could ever leave Columbine out.)
    As Professor Fox pointed out, other important criteria in their approach are also “hard to defend” or “not necessarily applied consistently.” For example:
    Mother Jones included the 1993 Chuck E. Cheese robbery/massacre of four people committed by a former employee, but excluded the Brown’s Chicken robbery/massacre of seven victims that occurred the very same year, presumably because two perpetrators were involved in the latter incident or perhaps because these gunmen had no prior connection to the restaurant.
    The Mother Jones methodology was created to ensure that only a very specific set of killings would be generated—a set that fit their narrative about an “epidemic” of these type of crimes. So what happens when you look at the data far more broadly and take into account all gun-related mass killings (four or more victims, not including the gunman) that were reported to the FBI by local law enforcement?

    Paints a slightly different picture, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s why Mother Jones, and those who follow its lead—chose to ignore it.
NO MASS KILLINGS HAVE EVER BEEN STOPPED BY SOMEONE ELSE WITH A GUN.
    “In the last 30 years there have been 62 mass shootings.Not a single one has ever been thwarted by a civilian despite America being a heavily armed country.”
    —PIERS MORGAN , January 9, 2013
    If you take this quote at face value it’s so stupid that it almost doesn’t deserve a response. Of course none of the “mass shootings” were stopped—if they’d been stopped they wouldn’t be called “mass shootings.” It’s like saying that not a single one of the 32,367 traffic fatalities that occurred in 2011 was thwarted by seat belts or air bags or speed limits. Yeah—no kidding, that’s why they’re fatalities.
    What Morgan’s circular argument leaves out is the fact that many homicides that easily could’ve turned into massacres have been stopped by others with a gun. You don’t hear much about these incidents because they either never happened or they never reached the “mass” level of four or more victims. The local media might cover the incident, but when there’s no grisly crime scene, no shaken friends or parents to interview at their most vulnerable time, no feeding frenzy about what kind of gun it was or how many bullets the magazine held, the national media loses interest fast.
    The Mother Jones “guide” to mass killings in America (which is very likely where Piers Morgan gets hisstatistic of “62 mass shootings” from) includes only incidents where at least four people were killed (not including the gunman) in one location. This definition ensures that any incident used in the study is, by definition, a mass killing that was not stopped. What that definition leaves out, of course, are all the times when someone was stopped before they could kill anyone, or after killing fewer than four people. If you don’t think that has ever happened, keep reading.
    On April 20, 1999, the country sat stunned as the Columbine massacre unfolded right in front of our eyes.