The Meme Policeman #fundie

The Meme Policeman #fundie facebook.com

The Other 98% posted a tweet from Harvey Bobrow about how Canada has had only 15 mass shootings since 1885 due to tougher gun laws, whereas the U.S. has at least one mass shooting per day.

This is just false.
-In a brief search, I found at least 28 incidents in Canada that would be considered mass shootings. All were since 1965.
-There doesn’t appear to be an outlet that tracks mass shootings in Canada, so there’s likely countless other incidents that would qualify, but haven’t been compiled. Remember, a mass shooting is generally defined as an incident where 4 or more people are hurt or killed by a firearm. Most mass shootings in the US involve zero or 1 death, so often aren’t widely reported or known.
-Thus, it takes a dedicated tracker to compile all the incidents. In the US, there’s gunviolencearchive.com which is where most outlets get their mass shooting statistics from.
-The vast majority of US mass shootings are gang related, and involve drive-by or similar style attacks. This is widely misunderstood, as people think of mass shootings as the much rarer events that garner media focus. Claiming the “one mass shooting a day” statistic capitalizes on this ignorance. Canada has far less gang violence, and consequently would be expected to have far less mass shootings.

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/—/canada-mass-shootings_n_144—
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Canada

14 comments

old comment by skybison

Speaking as a Canadian, I'm not seeing what's fundie about this.

Debunking a left wing meme as factually inaccurate is not fundie. All their points are true, especially number one, it's true there have been lots more mass shootings in Canada then 15, and when comparing numbers you have to take into account that Canada has only 1/10th of the US population.

The post says nothing claiming that gun control is bad or that sandy hook was a false flag, they don't deny Canada has a significantly lower homicide rate then the US overall, or say anything dishonest or inaccurate.

Saying "This statement from a gun control supporter isn't true" is not the same thing as "gun control is a commie plot". Just like if I said "Most stuff labelled Organic food isn't all that great for the environment" isn't the same thing as "Global warming is a hoax".

I'm not familiar with meme police as a website in general, so if they are trying to push some sort of far right stance with this or something yeah that would be fundie, but this post isn't.

old comment by Passerby

Why does gang violence not count as mass shootings in your eyes? That's idiotic. Whether it's a drive-by shooting, a recently fired office worker, a nutjob trying to make a "political statement" with murder, or an act of familicide what the hell stops it from fitting the definition of a mass shooting? But even if you do decide to say the gang stuff doesn't count it's still a daily thing in America. Gangland slayings are actually pretty low on the list of circumstances that lead to people getting shot. If you ask actual cops the most common shootings happen in domestic disputes.

There was a mass shooting in Illinois just the other day. 4 injured, one dead. The one dead guy is the guy who actually pinned the shooter down stopping the rampage and held him for the cops... who shot him. It's the last part that's the reason it's news because the rest of that sentence happens quite a lot and it's that last part that makes me want to knock assholes who say that if everyone else had guns and rushed every mass shooter lives would be saved right on their ass. Wasn't gang related at all, it was a disgruntled bar patron. Road rage, bullet-based vandalism, aggressive "self-defense" and vigilante fantasies, asinine attempts at intimidation, even fighting over sales at Wal-Mart. No, really. Americans will pull a gun for pretty much any excuse and it tends to go horribly wrong. And there's this demented, aggravatingly persistent attitude that things are only out of nearly-omnipotent control when someone reacts by pulling a gun if that person is incompetent. As though a shooter has a glowing neon sign pointing to them in the middle of a crowd and everyone in a several block radius has coordinated hyper-awareness, that mass hysteria doesn't exist, that rationality isn't impaired by adrenaline response, or force of will keeps a bullet from missing, straying, ricocheting, over-penetrating, etc. That guns don't go off by accident or that fingers won't twitch nervously, or that the sheer physical ease of pulling a trigger over other forms of violence doesn't make it almost a reflexive or subconscious act like swatting a fly that lands on your arm before you even think about it the very moment you have an aggressive thought. That pulling a gun in and of itself is not something that will escalate a bad situation and it is more important to be quick on the draw and the trigger than knowing what's even going on. It's a dangerous attitude.

A mass shooting a day is the average in the United States with tracking hampered by the fact the NRA successfully lobbied to prevent anyone that is funded by the government from tracking and publicizing the statistics meaning anyone who wants the numbers out there has to collate information from individual police precincts. Trying to pretend Canada is too lazy or inept or that some kind of corruption prevents us from tracking mass shootings and we're secretly hiding 15 more in our history or even full on lying and taking that 28 in a 50 year period and making it an annual figure isn't going to make your own track record, by far the worst in the world, any less horrifying. Starting by legitimately correcting a single factual inaccuracy lends no credence to anything that comes after it. It's not going to help you dismiss the effectiveness of gun control. You're the one counting on ignorance and distraction.