Here is a link to a paper by John Lott that shows that errors in the FBI's data led it to conclude, incorrectly, that public shootings had risen sharply from 2000 to 2013. The errors also hid the fact that a substantial fraction of public shootings are stopped by citizens legally carrying concealed weapons.
Here are some excerpts from the paper.
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In September 2014, the FBI released a report stating that public shootings had risen sharply since 2000.1 The report found that 160 “mass” or “active” shootings occurred in public places from 2000 to 2013, and increased from just 1 in 2000 to 17 in 2013. Newspaper headlines relied on the report’s data. “F.B.I. Confirms a Sharp Rise in Mass Shootings Since 2000” (New York Times); “Mass Shootings on the Rise, FBI says” (Wall Street Journal); “FBI: Mass shooting incidents occurring more frequently” (CNN); and “Mass shootings in U.S. have tripled in recent years, FBI says” (Los Angeles Times).However, warning signs also appeared regarding the completeness and accuracy of the report. A 2015 study in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today concluded that the FBI data undercounted crimes at the beginning of the period and over-counted toward the end, 4 thus exaggerating the increase in mass public shootings.
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The FBI report missed 20 multiple-victim shootings involving at least two people killed. Among them was a 2001 Chicago bar shooting that left two dead and 21 wounded. Another missed shooting left four dead at a concert in Columbus, Ohio in 2004. Worst of all, the FBI missed a school shooting that left nine people dead. The missing cases were three times more likely to have occurred from 2000-2006 than from 2007-2013, thus exaggerating the increase that was widely reported on.
When such missing cases are added to the dataset, it becomes clear that mass public shootings had only become slightly more frequent over the period of time examined by the report and even including the couple of decades prior to the period examined in this . The change is not statistically significant.
There has only been a slight, statistically insignificant upward trend over the 38 years from 1977 through 2014. Even then, the trend depends on a single year—2012 —when there were 91 deaths.
The chart also reveals another source of the exaggeration of an increased trend: the choice of the year 2000 as a start in the FBI report, when 2000 is widely known to be an unusually quiet year with few mass shootings.
Another part of the exaggerated increase was caused because the FBI included 32 instances of “active shooter” cases which involved a gun being fired with no fatalities (see Appendix Table 2). In eleven of those cases, either no one or just one person was wounded. Another 35 cases involved one murder.
Such counts of cases with few (or zero) victims suffer even more greatly from the problem that beset the FBI’s counts of multiple-victim public shootings: that articles become harder to find as one looks further back in time.
They especially suffer from the problem because when no victims are killed, reporting on the incident is relatively scarce and likely to get buried. For this reason, the chart and analysis above focuses on shootings in which two or more people were killed.
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The claim in the original FBI report that active shooting cases have increased over time was a result of data errors, both in terms of how the cases were collected and the missing of many attacks. Some of the cases that the original reports missed involved as many as four to nine people being murdered.
For the period from 2014 to 2019, the FBI had missed additional cases. Once those cases are included there were 25 cases out of 162 (15.4%) where people with permitted concealed handguns stopped the attacks. The FBI reports keep excluding cases where shootings attacks have been stopped by concealed handgun permit holders. To put it differently, while 36% of active shooting attacks have occurred in places where guns are allowed, almost half (42.3%) of those were stopped by people legally carry concealed handguns.
In light of these errors, media, courts, law enforcement, and policymakers, are advised to rely on the updated, corrected data provided in this report.
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