California, Despite Tough Gun Laws, Tops Nation in Mass Killings

[rangerrebew]

California, Despite Tough Gun Laws, Tops Nation in Mass Killings
Sun Dec 29, 2019 Daniel Greenfield
 

The media tends to characterize mass shootings by the rare incidents of mass killings of random people in public places. The reality is that a majority of mass shootings are personal. Many involve gang violence. Others, family and workplace breakdowns.

    The majority of the killings involved people who knew each other — family disputes, drug or gang violence or people with beefs that directed their anger at co-workers or relatives.

Beefs? Really AP? There was a time when the AP was a byword for style. So much for that.

But, more relevantly, mass shootings are largely about selling personal grudges, rather than killing random people.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/12/california-despite-tough-gun-laws-tops-nation-mass-daniel-greenfield/

[rangerrebew]

They are also among the highest in homelessness, and most poorly educated.  What a great place!

[PeteS in CA]

From the AP article linked in the TBR OP article, https://apnews.com/4441ae68d14e61b64110db44f906af92 :

In all, there were 41 mass killings, defined as when four or more people are killed excluding the perpetrator. Of those, 33 were mass shootings. More than 210 people were killed.

Most of the mass killings barely became national news, failing to resonate among the general public because they didn’t spill into public places like massacres in El Paso and Odessa, Texas; Dayton, Ohio; Virginia Beach, Virginia; and Jersey City, New Jersey.

The majority of the killings involved people who knew each other — family disputes, drug or gang violence or people with beefs that directed their anger at co-workers or relatives.
...
— California, with some of the most strict gun laws in the country, had the most, with eight such mass slayings. But nearly half of U.S. states experienced a mass slaying, from big cities like New York, to tiny towns like Elkmont, Alabama, with a population of just under 475 people.

One needs to be careful when raw numbers are cited. A better stat is per capita, which in this case would take into account the populations of the various states. However, also in this case, with CA having ~10% of the population of the US, eight "mass slayings" is double or triple what it "should" be on a per capita basis.

As a side note, it's interesting that AP uses what I believe is the FBI's definition of a mass shooting, "when four or more people are killed excluding the perpetrator". Kudos for AP's honesty. Gun-grabber groups and pols throw around vastly inflated numbers, because honest numbers don't support their crisis-hype.

BTW, cities like NYC and Chicago have governance that is at least as crazy-lib as SF or LA. The reason they have less homelessness is climate (= frigid winters). So crazy-lib governance is a factor in the prevalence of homelessness in CA, but not the sole factor.