The USA Has Less Mass Shootings Than Switzerland

I’m still on a break between school quarters, but doing a lot of praying about the soon-to-be-announced possible striking down of Roe v. Wade by the United States Supreme Court.

Abortion is the most serious crime of our time because its the largest form of “shedding of innocent blood” in human history. But there are other forms of heinous murder like unjust war, terrorism, and even school shootings–like the recent one at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Guess who leads the world in school shootings? Not the United States.

Here are the facts.

The USA Has Less Mass Shootings Than Switzerland

In the coming weeks I want to share some blogs on the root causes of increasing violence in our world. Yes, ever since the fall of man and the slaying of Abel by Cain, murder has been a sad and regular feature of human society.

In fact, before the spread of Judo-Christian principles of godly civil laws and human rights–taken from the Bible–the world was normally a violent place. Your town, city. or tribe could be here one day and exterminated by a stronger group or empire the next.

Like in Ukraine in 2022–but that’s an exception in our world (and another area for prayer).

Mass killings were common in the ancient world. Skulls and scalps from the massacres were often prominently displayed in hideous fashion. Most of the world for thousands of years lived in fear before the coming of Jesus brought faith, hope, and love. His salvation, applied to whole societies, began to vanquish fear through reverence for God, just laws, not dictators, and the belief in inalienable rights.

The more God’s laws and faith in Jesus have spread in the world, the less human violence has been tolerated.

But today, the decay of conscience, the rise of atheism, the power of deception (demonic influence), and global tools of media black-out and groupthink help fuel an epidemic of violence that even shows up where it should never be seen.

At school, or on the playgrounds.

Both homes and schools should be the safest places on earth. But we must tell the truth about it.

Read carefully this article by well-known journalist John Stossel–and pray. It sets the record straight about school shootings. Then I will share some final thoughts.

“The US Has the Most Mass Shootings–and Other Bogus Gun Research”

By John Stossel

[Recently]House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., warned President Donald Trump that if he declared an “emergency” to build a wall, “think what a president with different values can present. … Why don’t you declare [the epidemic of gun violence in America] an emergency, President Biden? I wish you would. … A Democratic president can declare emergencies as well.”

Her fellow Democrats, Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., quickly agreed. Warren tweeted: “Gun violence is an emergency. Climate change is an emergency.”

Yikes.

Not every problem in America should be declared an emergency—or used by a president to justify acting without Congress.

But why are guns on the Democrats’ “emergency” list anyway?

One reason is sloppy reporting by lazy media.

Last year, they claimed that there were school shootings at “hundreds of schools.” It was “an almost daily occurrence” in the U.S., some said.

This was nonsense. NPR reporters looked into the 235 shootings reported by the U.S. Department of Education and were only able to confirm 11 of them.

It turned out that schools were added to the list merely because someone at a school heard there may have been a shooting. Good for NPR for checking out the Education Department’s claims.

Economist John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (and the father of one of my producers), spends much of his time researching gun use and correcting shoddy studies.

A few years ago, much of the media claimed that the U.S. has “the most mass shootings of any country in the world.” Then-President Barack Obama added it’s “a pattern now … that has no parallel anywhere else … .”

CNN and the Los Angeles Times wrote about “Why the U.S. Has the Most Mass Shootings.” (“The United States has more guns.”)

But the U.S. doesn’t have the most mass shootings, says Lott. It’s a myth created by University of Alabama associate professor Adam Lankford, a myth repeated by anti-gun media in hundreds of news stories.

“Lankford claimed that since 1966, there were 90 mass public shooters in the United States, more than any other country,” says Lott. “Lankford claimed ‘complete data’ were available from 171 countries.”

But how could that be? Many governments don’t collect such data, and even fewer have information from before the days of the internet.

A shooting in say, India, would likely be reported only in local newspapers, in a local dialect. How would Lankford ever find out about it? How did he collect his information? What languages did he search in?

He won’t say.

“That’s academic malpractice,” says Lott in my video about the controversy.

I’m not surprised that Lankford didn’t reply to Lott’s emails. Lott is known as pro-gun. (He wrote the book “More Guns, Less Crime.”) But Lankford also won’t explain his data to me, The Washington Post, or even his fellow gun control advocates.

When Lott’s research center checked the data, using Lankford’s own definition of a mass shooting—“four or more people killed”—the center found 3,000 shootings around the world. Lankford claimed there were only 202.

Lankford said he excludes “sponsored terrorism,” but does not define what he means by that. To be safe, Lott removed terrorism cases from his data. He still found 709 shootings—more than triple the number Lankford reported.

It turns out that not only did the U.S. not have the most frequent mass shootings, it was No. 62 on the list, lower than places like Norway, Finland, and Switzerland.

There was also no relationship between the rate of gun ownership in different countries and the rate of mass shootings.

If journalists had just demanded Lankford explain his study methods before touting his results, his “more mass shootings” myth would never have spread.

So if Pelosi, Harris, and Warren ever follow through on their threat to declare gun violence a “national emergency,” be sure to check their math. Or just remember the wisdom of the Second Amendment.

Governments desire to control us—and to lie to make its case—is the real emergency.

There are many necessary and constructive things we can do to stop school violence. One is to federalize all gun crimes so they are taken out of the hands of progressive DA’s with no bail laws that let criminals get away with murder.

We can also “harden” our school environments just like we did when hijacking became common in airline industry–making the skies unsafe. Metal detectors at all schools and one main entrance would work wonders to foil insane or evil people. 

We can also place retired police or military at school entrances to deter evildoers. We can also arm teachers and other personnel–the “good guys”–to help protect the world of learning and innocence. 

And we must pray for a revival of conscience, God’s laws in society, Jesus’ love in peoples’ hearts and peace on earth–especially for the sake of innocent children.