The FBI released a
report today suggesting that “active shooter incidents” grew
more common from 2000 to 2013. Reason readers may wonder
how to square that conclusion with the
statistics we’ve published suggesting that mass shootings
are not on the rise. There are two answers to that. One involves
some potential problems with the FBI’s numbers; we’ll get to that
issue in a moment. The other answer is simpler: “Active shooter”
and “mass shooting” do not mean the same thing.
You’re forgiven if you didn’t get that impression from the press
coverage of the FBI report. The Wall Street Journal, for
example, called its story on the study “Mass
Shootings on the Rise, FBI Says.” The Huffington Post
went with “FBI
Study Finds Mass Shootings On The Rise, Often End Before Police Can
Respond.” The Daily Beast didn’t just use the headline
“FBI:
Mass Shootings Are on The Rise“; every single sentence in its
brief article includes the phrase “mass shooting” or “mass
shootings.”
While there are
competing definitions of “mass shooting” out there, they all
cover crimes that wouldn’t fit in the FBI’s list of active-shooter
incidents; the FBI’s count in turn includes events that no one
would call a mass shooting. The standard government definition of
an active shooter is “an individual actively engaged in killing or
attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.” (It
doesn’t mention firearms, but the word shooter obviously
excludes other means of murder.) The authors of the FBI report
tweaked this definition slightly, dropping the word “confined”
because they didn’t want to leave out crimes committed outdoors.
They also excluded killings connected to gang rivalries or the drug
trade—a major difference between these numbers and the
mass-shooting statistics assembled by criminologists
like James Alan Fox,
one of the country’s leading authorities on mass murder. (For Fox,
a mass shooting is any homicide with a firearm that leaves at least
four people dead.) Another major difference: Rather than basing its
definition on how many people were killed, the FBI report focuses
on homicidal intent. If the perp only wounds his victims,
or if he doesn’t even manage to do that, he still gets counted.
Fewer than half of the incidents in the FBI report qualify as mass
shootings under Fox’s definition.
At any rate, the FBI found 160 incidents that left 486 victims
dead and 557 wounded. (The casualty figures do not include the
shooters themselves, though they often die during the attacks.) In
the first seven years, an average of 6.4 incidents occured
annually; in the last seven years, the figure was 16.4. The average
number of casualties per year increases too. Here are the
year-to-year data in a couple of charts:
Those are raw numbers, not per capita figures, but by my
back-of-the-envelope calculations you still see an rise in the
casualty count if you adjust for population
growth.
So is it true that these incidents are becoming more common?
Fox isn’t convinced. “Unlike mass shooting data,” he says,
“which come from routinely collected police reports, there is no
official data source for active shooter events. Necessarily, these
data derived from newspaper searches for the term ‘active shooter’
and similar words. Not only is the term ‘active shooter’ of
relatively recent vintage (although created after the 1999
Columbine shooting, it wasn’t used much in news reports until the
past two years), but the availability of digitized and searchable
news services has grown tremendously over the time span covered by
the data. Thus, it is not clear whether the increase is completely
related to the actual case count or to the availability and
accessibility of news reports surrounding such events.” Fox
acknowledges that the FBI report draws on police records as well as
press accounts, but he points out that the cases were initially
identified by searching news reports, “with police department
records helpful for the details.”
Grant Duwe is skeptical about the numbers too. Duwe is the
director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Department of
Corrections; each year he
compiles a list of mass shootings that take place in public and
are not a byproduct of some other felony. (He would not, for
example, include a stick-up man who shoots several people while
fleeing the police.) His figures showed an steady decline from 1999
to 2011 with a spike in 2012, which is not the pattern you might
expect from those active-shooter numbers. While he appreciates some
aspects of the new report—he singles out its “detailed breakdown of
the specific locations where these incidents occurred”—he has
issues with it as well, noting that 10 of the mass shootings on his
list are missing from the FBI’s report. (These omissions appear
throughout the period covered, without being clustered at either
the beginning or the end.) Since the FBI’s list “is neither a
random nor an exhaustive sample,” he says, “it’s inappropriate to
make any claims—which this report does—about trends in the
prevalence of cases meeting their definition.” He thinks it
possible that such a rise has happened, but he doesn’t think the
report proves it.
For Fox, a
vocal critic of the way the phrase “active shooter” has come to
be used, the chief concern is that people understand “these events
are exceptionally rare and not necessarily on the increase.” While
he fully supports serious efforts to prevent and prepare for such
crimes, he also thinks it “critical that we avoid unnecessarily and
carelessly scaring the American public with questionable statements
about a surge in active shooter events.”
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