AIM as suggested by TS
The Washington PostFact Checker gave former president Bill Clinton three Pinocchio’s for a statement he made last week on assault weapons and mass killings in the U.S.
Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapons ban expired in 2005, half of all of them in the history of the country.
That’s a pretty bold statement, but not surprising coming from Clinton, who signed an assault weapons ban into law in 1994, which wasn’t renewed when it expired in 2004. His statement comes at a time when emotions and rhetoric on guns are running high after the tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, last month. Using data assembled from Grant Duwe, director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, the Fact Checker found that Clinton’s claim was exaggerated by a fairly wide margin. Using Duwe’s definition of a mass public shooting as an incident in which four or more victims are killed publicly with guns within 24 hours — in the workplace, schools, restaurants and other public places — excluding shootings in connection with crimes such as robbery, drugs or gangs, there have been 156 incidents in the U.S. in the past 100 years.
Of that number there have been 32 mass shootings since the assault weapons ban expired, which computes to just a little over 20 percent, not the 50 percent that Clinton cited.
First of all, who the hell is Grant Duwe? Secondly, I thought we should go back, say, 20 years, not 100.
Also, don't we count "mass shootings" to be those in which 4 people are shot? Isn't there a difference between "mass shootings" and "mass killings?"
