Scholar Wilfred Reilly has noted that tv crime shows like “Law and Order” portray a grossly disproportionate picture of criminals as white, in complete contradiction of actual crime figures. YouGov surveys also show that public perceptions of America are vastly out of step with reality.
For instance, Americans believe that 20% of the population is transgender: in reality, it’s under 1%. Similarly, it’s believed that 30% are gay or lesbian: it’s actually just 3%. 41% are black? No, 13%.
Where does this disparity between perception and reality come from? One obvious answer is film and tv, where minorities are “represented” as being far more numerous than they really are. Hollywood has an iron quota system which specifies that 40% of all casting must black — which is suspiciously close to the erroneous public perception — and “20% women and non-binary people from underrepresented races and ethnicities”.
Hollywood and the rest of the media are consciously lying about America to America.
Especially about guns. Americans believe that 54% of them own a gun. It’s actually 32%.
The disconnect from reality is even more stark when it comes to mass shootings.
“There is not an epidemic of mass shootings”
Contrary to what you’ve heard from Biden and the media, school massacres like the one in Uvalde are exceptionally rare events. They actually occurred more often in the 1990s than recently—but back then, there wasn’t an army of satellite trucks competing around the clock to chronicle the horror.
“There is not an epidemic of mass shootings,” says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has been tracking these events for decades and helps keep the AP/USA Today/Northeastern Mass Killing database. “What’s increasing and is out of control is the epidemic of fear.”
This includes such deliberate fear-mongering as Joe Biden’s claim of “900 incidents of gunfire” on school grounds since 2012. But in most of these incidents, no students died. Most of the incidents occurred outside schools and after school hours. Most “mass shootings” (defined by the FBI as “involving 4 or more victims at one or more locations close to one another”) are not the sort of ghastly massacres at Uvalde, but most commonly drive-by shootings. Almost all are committed with hand guns, not the bogey-man “assault rifles”.
For all that, though, most Americans are paralysed with fear about school shootings.
Surveys show that half of Americans worry about being the victim of a mass shooting, and a third of them avoid going to certain places and events because of this fear. More than 60 percent of parents worry that their child will be killed in a mass shooting at school.
In fact:
As Fox notes, the annual odds that an American child will die in a mass shooting at school are nearly 10 million to 1, about the odds of being killed by lightning or of dying in an earthquake. Those are also about the same odds that any American will die in a mass public shooting like the recent one in Buffalo. Such numbers, of course, are no consolation to the grieving parents and families in Uvalde and Buffalo, but neither is the frenzy to manipulate these tragedies for ratings and political gain.
There is a danger, here, of slipping into the same misleading argument as terrorism minimisers: just because an event is rare, doesn’t mean that it can be hand-waved away. Like terrorist attacks, school shootings are uniquely awful. It’s perfectly legitimate to want to try to ensure they don’t happen.
The issue is not letting blind panic dictate poor responses.
Children do need to be better protected from criminals, and there might be ways to make schools safer, but students don’t need the active-shooter drills now conducted in over 95 percent of the nation’s schools, and which are associated with higher levels of depression, stress and anxiety. Nor do children and parents need to hear the deceptive statistics promoted by the press and the White House’s fearmonger-in-chief […]
We can all agree that even one of these massacres is too many. But wallowing in the gruesome details will not prevent another, and neither will blaming the senseless murders on political enemies. We should be looking for ways to protect children and adults from all the dangers they face—including the recent homicide surge claiming nearly 100 additional lives every week.
City Journal
The most immediate answer that would do much to stem the current spate of shootings — shooters are nothing if not copy-cats — while longer-term solutions are calmly worked out is the very one that anti-gun activists right up to President Biden are most adamantly opposed to.
That is: arming schools to protect themselves. Sure, it’s not “nice”, but neither is a chain-link fence at the top of a cliff. But at least it will put an immediate stop to the tragedies in the short term.
And more importantly, stop the lying.
