"Batman Massacre"

[Nekojin]

His numbers are flawed. From his own source, a wikipedia page:


Which leaves out numbers for incidents like:
32 killed at Virginia tech in 2007
9 killed in Red lake, MN in 2009
13 killed at Ft. Hood in 2009

Add in those numbers and you have 171 murdered in the last decade, not 117. Who knows how many more he left out for his "report"

Even if your analysis is correct, that doesn't really change the summary. If we're talking a difference between 50% more deaths and 120% more deaths in the US in the same time span, measured against 4000% more people, the summary is still the same: You're more likely to die in a spree shooting in Norway than in the US.

And the point isn't to show that Norway is dangerous - precisely the opposite. Spree shootings, taken as a whole, are such a tiny, tiny anomaly, with so few instances and so few deaths overall, that it's not worth worrying about, and certainly not worth pushing reactionary legislation over.

But they weren't the only casualties of those incidents. There were also 213 people wounded in all of those attacks that managed to survive.

Shifting the discussion from deaths to casualties doesn't exactly help your point. Breivik's attacks are counted as 77 dead, and at least 319 injured over the course of the day - 209 at the Oslo bombing, and 110 at the Utoya massacre. That makes the total casualties in Norway almost as high as all of the casualties in all of the spree shootings in the US.

And, again, my point is that the statistics prove two things: 1.) That taken along with all of the other deaths that occur every year, spree shootings are barely more than statistical noise; 2.) People overreact to the spree shootings, because they're dramatic and shocking, not because of the actual threat posed.

[crashhelmet]

Even if your analysis is correct,

Wait... WHAT????? Even if my analysis is correct? Are you denying those events took place?

that doesn't really change the summary. If we're talking a difference between 50% more deaths and 120% more deaths in the US in the same time span, measured against 4000% more people, the summary is still the same: You're more likely to die in a spree shooting in Norway than in the US.

And the point isn't to show that Norway is dangerous - precisely the opposite. Spree shootings, taken as a whole, are such a tiny, tiny anomaly, with so few instances and so few deaths overall, that it's not worth worrying about, and certainly not worth pushing reactionary legislation over.


Shifting the discussion from deaths to casualties doesn't exactly help your point. Breivik's attacks are counted as 77 dead, and at least 319 injured over the course of the day - 209 at the Oslo bombing, and 110 at the Utoya massacre. That makes the total casualties in Norway almost as high as all of the casualties in all of the spree shootings in the US.

And, again, my point is that the statistics prove two things: 1.) That taken along with all of the other deaths that occur every year, spree shootings are barely more than statistical noise; 2.) People overreact to the spree shootings, because they're dramatic and shocking, not because of the actual threat posed.

4000% more? Where the hell do you get your numbers? 4000% more of 171, or even 117 is over 4,000 people. Who? Where? How? Huh????

The attacks in Norway killed 77 people and also involved a bomb. His "analysis" is about shootings. If you want to talk about bombings here in the US, we can point to the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured more than 680. There's also the failed attempts like the car bomb in New York City that had the potential to take many lives.

Back to Norway, he used the bomb to kill 8 people and injure another 209 while creating a distraction allowing him to go over to the island camp and begin his massacre. He spent the next 90+ minutes systematically killing his next 69 victims. 67 of those were shot. 57 of those 67 were shot through the head. The other 2 died trying to escape. 1 fell to their death, the other drowned. This psycho had all the time in the world to carry out his plan.

If the shooters at Columbine had their bomb go off in the cafeteria, as they planned, they would've had a higher body count. If the shooter at Virginia tech had used something to cause a distraction elsewhere, he may have had a higher body count himself.

[Andara Bledin]

Wait... WHAT????? Even if my analysis is correct? Are you denying those events took place?

I'm not sure how you interpret a question regarding the accuracy of an analysis to be a question of the accuracy of the facts the analysis is based on.

It means exactly what it says; that he's not going to check your analysis for whether or not it's a correct interpretation of the events, which are not being questioned in any manner, positive or negative.

4000% more? Where the hell do you get your numbers? 4000% more of 171, or even 117 is over 4,000 people. Who? Where? How? Huh????

You might want to go back and review the thread; 4000% is a comment on the relative population of the US (over 300m) versus Norway (just under 5m). This is actually 6000%, so he was erring (heavily) on the conservative side.

If the shooters at Columbine had their bomb go off in the cafeteria, as they planned, they would've had a higher body count. If the shooter at Virginia tech had used something to cause a distraction elsewhere, he may have had a higher body count himself.

The fact that these things fail so often is already part of the risk analysis and a lot of the reason why our reaction to these events is so disproportionate to their actual impact.

When talking about the average life of the average person, these events are nothing more than noise. If you want to help people, then we should not be spending more than a minimal effort on each of these events to find the obvious gaps in our protections and reactions and put our time and resources to something important like, say, rail safety or better food handling control. You know, the sorts of things that affect millions of people every single year, not the ones that affect maybe a hundred or so a couple of times a decade.

^-.-^

[Nekojin]

Andara already addressed the key parts of your response.

The attacks in Norway killed 77 people and also involved a bomb. His "analysis" is about shootings. If you want to talk about bombings here in the US, we can point to the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured more than 680. There's also the failed attempts like the car bomb in New York City that had the potential to take many lives.

Back to Norway, he used the bomb to kill 8 people and injure another 209 while creating a distraction allowing him to go over to the island camp and begin his massacre. He spent the next 90+ minutes systematically killing his next 69 victims. 67 of those were shot. 57 of those 67 were shot through the head. The other 2 died trying to escape. 1 fell to their death, the other drowned. This psycho had all the time in the world to carry out his plan.

If the shooters at Columbine had their bomb go off in the cafeteria, as they planned, they would've had a higher body count. If the shooter at Virginia tech had used something to cause a distraction elsewhere, he may have had a higher body count himself.

So the solution is clear - ban the ownership of explosives by private individuals.

Wait, that's already the case. You need permits to buy even low-grade dynamite, and higher-end stuff is out-and-out illegal unless you have "Security Grade" style permits. Even purchases of materials that could be used for bomb-making (such as bulk fertilizer) are heavily tracked and scrutinized.

What point are you trying to make, again?

[crashhelmet]

Andara already addressed the key parts of your response.


So the solution is clear - ban the ownership of explosives by private individuals.

Wait, that's already the case. You need permits to buy even low-grade dynamite, and higher-end stuff is out-and-out illegal unless you have "Security Grade" style permits. Even purchases of materials that could be used for bomb-making (such as bulk fertilizer) are heavily tracked and scrutinized.

What point are you trying to make, again?

My original point was that his data was flawed, skewing the statistics and analysis that he proudly stated as his profession. Assumptions could be made based off the rest of the content on his blog as to why, but that's neither here nor there.

My second point was that a large portion of the casualties caused in Norway were due to a bombing and not the shooting. This has been about mass shootings. Not Acts of Terrorism in general.

Now, the problem I have with using statistics to say Norway is at a higher risk of death by mass shootings, or acts of terrorism, than the US because of that one incident is a fallacy. That was one incident, where here in the US they are far more common. If not incidents like the many school shootings we've had, which again the blogger omitted from his analysis, former employees going "postal" and killing large numbers of people (also omitted), or the guy in Aurora shooting up a theatre, we have acts of foreign and domestic terrorism, like Oklahoma City, Time Square, the original attempt to blow up the WTC, Atlanta Olympics, the Unibomber, the Anthrax scare, and of course 9/11.

How many other incidents have occurred in Norway?

[Andara Bledin]

My second point was that a large portion of the casualties caused in Norway were due to a bombing and not the shooting. This has been about mass shootings. Not Acts of Terrorism in general.

How they died is fairly irrelevant (and if you're speaking specifically of shootings versus all terror acts, then why did you even bring up the attempted bombing at Columbine?)

Now, the problem I have with using statistics to say Norway is at a higher risk of death by mass shootings, or acts of terrorism, than the US because of that one incident is a fallacy.

The fact is that over the last decade, as an individual who died in that time, you have a higher likelihood of having died to a spree shooting event versus, say, a car accident in Norway than you would in the US. Norway has so much smaller a population that the US would have to have had over 4600 deaths by spree shootings to reach the same probability and we know the actual number is likely about 5% of that number.

However, as I touched on earlier, that isn't really the whole story. There are so many different factors that impart different degrees and angles of spin to any probability event that even the most nuanced of predictions (of which this most definitely is not) are merely best guesses.

And at the end of the day, you're still left with the same message: taking more than minimal action towards the prevention of spree shootings is a waste of resources, which are depressingly finite.

When you can protect what is likely to only be a few dozen people each year (if that) from these events for the same cost as improving the safety of millions, the choice should be obvious, and yet, over and over again we opt for security theater over genuine and quantifiable safety improvements.

^-.-^

[Nekojin]

My original point was that his data was flawed, skewing the statistics and analysis that he proudly stated as his profession. Assumptions could be made based off the rest of the content on his blog as to why, but that's neither here nor there.

My second point was that a large portion of the casualties caused in Norway were due to a bombing and not the shooting. This has been about mass shootings. Not Acts of Terrorism in general.

Now, the problem I have with using statistics to say Norway is at a higher risk of death by mass shootings, or acts of terrorism, than the US because of that one incident is a fallacy. That was one incident, where here in the US they are far more common. If not incidents like the many school shootings we've had, which again the blogger omitted from his analysis, former employees going "postal" and killing large numbers of people (also omitted), or the guy in Aurora shooting up a theatre, we have acts of foreign and domestic terrorism, like Oklahoma City, Time Square, the original attempt to blow up the WTC, Atlanta Olympics, the Unibomber, the Anthrax scare, and of course 9/11.

How many other incidents have occurred in Norway?

You appear to be blithely missing the point (partly because we're arguing similar points). The United States is far, far larger than Norway, of course it's going to have more incidents of X (pretty much regardless of whatever X is).

Take the entire EU, rather than just Norway, and you've got slightly more than 1.5 times the population of the US. How many such incidents have occurred in the EU in the same time frame as you're drawing your list of events from?

My main point was that the statistics on this sort of event are wonky, because they're so incredibly rare, and even though they sound big and scary when they're each taken on their own, they're actually pretty unimportant overall, when you take everything else into consideration. Even the 9/11 attack is a statistical blip compared to any other method of dying violently in the US. Car accidents alone make them disappear off the charts. Accidental shootings make them look trivial. Even non-"spree" shootings take far more lives than the spree shooters. But because the spree shooters are shocking, sudden, and happen to people we don't expect it to happen to, it's news, it's scary, and people want something done. They're scared far out of proportion to the actual danger that such events pose.

[crashhelmet]

How they died is fairly irrelevant (and if you're speaking specifically of shootings versus all terror acts, then why did you even bring up the attempted bombing at Columbine?)

The possibility of increased Casualty Numbers.

The fact is that over the last decade, as an individual who died in that time, you have a higher likelihood of having died to a spree shooting event versus, say, a car accident in Norway than you would in the US. Norway has so much smaller a population that the US would have to have had over 4600 deaths by spree shootings to reach the same probability and we know the actual number is likely about 5% of that number.

However, as I touched on earlier, that isn't really the whole story. There are so many different factors that impart different degrees and angles of spin to any probability event that even the most nuanced of predictions (of which this most definitely is not) are merely best guesses.

Which is exactly my beef with the use of statistics, especially per capita statistics. In the last 10 years there was 1 reported case of rabies infection in a human in Arkansas, as compared to 5 in Texas. Using per capita statistics, you could say that you're almost twice as likely to be infected in Arkansas as you are in Texas. But that can also be read as 1 every 10 years in Arkansas vs 1 every 2 years in Texas. Comparing the Norway massacre to the ones in US is 1 to >20 (The blog I've been nitpicking listed 17 incidents, I added my 3 examples, and there are most likely more given the source's omission several factors).

So Norway averages 1 massacre every 10 years. The US averages 1 every 6 months, possibly more often than that. I wonder how bad those are when we go back 20 years? 30? 40?

This is why I'm arguing the use of statistics. While I as an individual might be safer here than in Norway, that doesn't mean that the nation is safer.

And at the end of the day, you're still left with the same message: taking more than minimal action towards the prevention of spree shootings is a waste of resources, which are depressingly finite.

When you can protect what is likely to only be a few dozen people each year (if that) from these events for the same cost as improving the safety of millions, the choice should be obvious, and yet, over and over again we opt for security theater over real safety improvements.

^-.-^

There has to be a compromise of both. Improve safety but install that security theatre to catch those that slip through the cracks. This is why we have metal detectors at airports and sporting events. This is why we set up DUI checkpoints on holiday weekends. This is why you have to submit to a background check to buy a gun in most places.

[siead_lietrathua]

ON-TOPIC:
my fondness for bale gets a bit bigger. he went and visited the victims <3
as himself, not as a rep of DC, warner, or anyone else.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/850...ms-in-hospital
i wonder how many kids called him bruce wayne? lol

[HYHYBT]

When an event is rare enough (and certainly a single incident in Norway's case counts) you can't really get meaningful statistics out of it of the kind you're trying to. The same with the rabies cases: there are simply too few of them, at least those mentioned here, to determine odds in any even vaguely useful manner.

[Nekojin]

When an event is rare enough (and certainly a single incident in Norway's case counts) you can't really get meaningful statistics out of it.

Which is precisely my point. I wasn't actually trying to say anything about Norway at all, it just makes a great example, just like the Concorde*. These other incidents are also rare - rare enough that attempting to force any sort of policy change over them is foolish. It's just that we've got this massive country that we like to call the USA, and even though they're in dramatically different parts of the country, they all get lumped into, "American crimes."

Lumping, say, California in over for mass murders that happened in Massachusetts is as foolish as wagging a finger at France for something that happens in Romania. Saying it's an "American" problem, or saying that America has a problem, is out-and-out HWFO, when it's statistically not even a problem at all.

* The Concorde's safety rating went from first to worst with a single crash. Because it flew so rarely in comparison to other aircraft types, one accident was enough to drop it to the bottom of the list in terms of fatalities per passenger-mile.

[Andara Bledin]

When an event is rare enough (and certainly a single incident in Norway's case counts) you can't really get meaningful statistics out of it of the kind you're trying to.

That's actually the point Nekojin & I are making.

Even with all of the spree shootings that have happened in the US, it's still not nearly enough to rise from the noise of statistical anomaly.

^-.-^

[Gravekeeper]

Even with all of the spree shootings that have happened in the US, it's still not nearly enough to rise from the noise of statistical anomaly.

Neither are plane crashs but we still take precautions.

Fact of the matter is, practically every US mass shooting has involved firearms which are banned or heavily restricted in every other western nation: Handguns and assault rifles. Yet people who are obviously mentally ill have been able to easily obtain said weapons an alarming number of times. Typically by straight up buying them at a legitimate store. Even more alarmingly, a lot of said attacks tend to be premediated and planned weeks or months in advance without setting off any red flags for anyone or any organization or system.

Gun control is only one aspect of the problem in the US but it IS still an aspect of it. Claiming otherwise at this point is willfull ignorance. You've had 125 mass shootings since Columbine alone. >.>

The US is notable not just for the apparent frequency of spree shootings, but for the ultimate body counts the perpetrators are able to reach due to their equipment. When you're regularly beating Brazil, Columbia, Uganda, Mexico, Yemen and Afghanistan there's a problem with the system.

[Nekojin]

Gun control is only one aspect of the problem in the US but it IS still an aspect of it. Claiming otherwise at this point is willfull ignorance. You've had 125 mass shootings since Columbine alone. >.>

It's late, and I really don't want to be researching things right before bed, but I found your citation for "125 mass shootings" and it's just a list of shootings where more than one person is killed - at first glance, quite a few of them appear to be gang-related.

There's a notable difference between someone shooting at people he hates, and someone shooting up a random group of people.

The US is notable not just for the apparent frequency of spree shootings, but for the ultimate body counts the perpetrators are able to reach due to their equipment. When you're regularly beating Brazil, Columbia, Uganda, Mexico, Yemen and Afghanistan there's a problem with the system.

Well, going by that list of "125 shootings since Columbine," most shootings seem to have a fairly low body count - most of them are low single-digit death tolls. I don't know where you're getting some idea that they're regularly racking up large numbers.

For others who want to play along, here is the article that he's obliquely referencing.

[Gravekeeper]

It's late, and I really don't want to be researching things right before bed, but I found your citation for "125 mass shootings" and it's just a list of shootings where more than one person is killed - at first glance, quite a few of them appear to be gang-related.

You obviously didn't read the very first thing the article said.

Well, going by that list of "125 shootings since Columbine," most shootings seem to have a fairly low body count - most of them are low single-digit death tolls. I don't know where you're getting some idea that they're regularly racking up large numbers.

When you compare the worst sprees in modern history on a country by country basis, the US typically rates near or at the top. The only blip being the Norway spree. People in other countries don't typically make it as far and/or don't have access to the same level of weaponry.

China for example when someone snaps and goes on a spree, its typically with a melee weapon.