President of the Crime Prevention Research Center John Lott asserts that the FBI’s crime statistics are “distorting” gun violence, and with the media’s help, portraying to the public that “mass shootings” are more of a threat than they really are.
Lott, author of the book More Guns, Less Crime explained that the latest annual crime report from the FBI appear to be deliberately misleading.
“The FBI put out a clearly incorrect set of numbers on public shootings shortly before the November election last year,” said Lott “I have been reading FBI reports for 30 years and I have never seen anything like this. It is one thing for the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the National Institute of Justice to put out politically biased studies, but there has always been a Chinese wall separating the FBI raw data collection from political pressures.”
The figures released last September show “mass shooter” incidents have dramatically increased since 2000. “The report asserted there were a total 160 such incidents in public places between 2000 and 2013, with attacks dramatically increased to 17 in 2013 from just one in 2000. The statistics also showed murders jumping to 86 from just seven over the span.”
Not so fast says Lott, who points out that recent crime reports used media stories that were “more accessible” in recent times thus “over-representing” more recent shootings.
The left-leaning media, who leave unquestioned anything that supports their biases, treated the recent FBI report at face value. But according to Lott, the CPRC’s counter-report shows that when corrected for bias and errors, the mass shooting rate has been cut in half.
“The administration has obviously been willing to do a lot to push for gun control; with everything from ‘Operation Choke Point’ to ‘Fast and Furious,’ and this is just part of that push. Given the level of politicization in [the] Department of Justice, this is not particularly surprising.”
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