Mass-Shooting Inflation: A Real Problem Is Being Clouded by Completely Inaccurate Figures

Another day, another mass shooting. Except — while we all mourn together for the victims of the very real Michigan State University tragedy — not exactly.

Immediately after the horrific February 13 attack on MSU’s East Lansing campus by armed lunatic Anthony McRae, who killed three students and critically wounded five others, the internet began to buzz with comments like this one, a tweet from political writer Jeff Tiedrich that went viral: “holy f***ing sh**, 67 mass shootings in the first 45 days of 2023! America’s door problem [a reference to the jammed door that contributed to the Uvalde, Texas, tragedy] is out of control.” Far more serious people — Tiedrich runs a blog called the “Smirking Chimp” — have made virtually identical comments in the wake of this disaster and others. Robert Reich, secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, posted the following:

Responses to that one, which as of Wednesday had drawn more than 70,000 likes, reached into the thousands and often approached the hysterical, with some quite prominent figures blaming the death toll on everything from inner-city “Black” and “Democratic” crime to alleged GOP softness regarding the purchase of AR-15s and other rifles. However, before we debate any of that — and, as a gun-totin’ right-leaning black guy, I am certainly willing to do so — it is critical to point out a foundational problem with Reich’s data. There were not 647 mass shootings in 2022.