GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE, OR DO THEY?

[HairOfTheDog]

And this is for you B.H. just because I know you appreciate the truth.

Obama said after the church shootings in Charleston that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency."

The data shows that it clearly happens in other countries, and in at least three of them, there’s evidence that the rate of killings in mass-shooting events occurred at a higher per-capita rate than in the United States between 2000 and 2014. The only partial support for Obama’s claim is that the per-capita gun-incident fatality rate in the United States does rank in the top one-third of the list of 11 countries studied. On balance, we rate the claim Mostly False.

Facts

Here's the direct link to the Facts: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/...appen-oth/

Obama made a couple of misleading or 'mostly false' statements in that speech, in my opinion. And, I like PolitiFact. But, their fact checker did a very poor job analyzing this particular statement.

Statement, as I heard it: "This type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries; it doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency."

If one interprets the second sentence to be a qualifier for the first one and the word "frequency" to refer to "how often" rather than "number of fatalities per capita', then Obama's statement is true -- as confirmed by the fact checker's stats chart and quote below:


'The chart does show that the United States has more mass shootings -- and more people cumulatively killed or injured -- than the other 10 nations combined..'

It doesn't make any sense to me that the fact checker interpreted 'frequency" to mean "number of fatalities per capita'' rather than "how often incidents occured", but it doesn't really matter.

In my opinion, mass shootings happen too often in the U.S., period. And, mass shootings happen much more often in the US than any other advanced country -- that's not disputed.