Investing More Resources To Stop Mass Murder May Make Political Sense, But It Doesn’t Make Common Sense

MementoMori_

Mass murder incidents certainly are horrific, but not very significant in the bigger picture of homicides in America or looked at in the perspective of the population. The significance of mass murders in America is much more about partisan politics then it is about the safety and security of the American people.

There were 17,234 homicides in America in 2017.

It's not easy to get the statistics on mass murder because there's no universally accepted definition of mass murder. But if you use one of the broadest definitions, it looks like the number of people murdered in mass murder events in 2018 will be less than or around 100.

So it's mixing two years but I think it's still reasonable to say that about one half of 1% of people who are murdered in America are murdered in mass murder incidents. That means it's pretty insignificant in terms of homicides.

These incidents are tragically spectacular and publicizing them serves several political purposes, so they make the headlines.

Investing More Resources To Stop Mass Murder May Make Political Sense, But It Doesn’t Make Common Sense

What doesn't make the headlines, however, is the thousands of homicides that involve inner-city minorities murdering each other every year at alarming war-casualty-like rates. That's a much more significant problem, but it’s largely ignored because it doesn’t fit the narrative that the biased media and certain political interests want to push.

The population of the United States is about 326 million. If there are 100 people murdered in mass murders every year, that means about 3 one hundred thousandths of 1% of the population of the country is murdered in mass murders events.

All murders are terrible of course. But the magnitude of the problem has to be looked at based on the size of the relative population. And if you look at it on that basis, it's so insignificant that rational analysis concludes that it isn't even worth investing anything additional to try to reduce it any further. We clearly are already doing about the best that can be reasonably be expected without imposing any further draconian costs, and quite successfully. That's why the numbers are so astoundingly tiny. Is it really worth investing so much more try to reduce it even further? Is it really even possible to reduce it much further no matter how much we invest? That investment could be used much more productively and beneficially elsewhere.

And what do I mean by “invest.” Yes, I am talking about investing billions of dollars more on security on top of the tens of billions at least that is already spent (successfully) to stop these kinds of events. But maybe even more importantly I am talking about the cost of impeding the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of our citizens. It diminishes the quality of life and productivity for people to have to feel they are living in an armed encampment everywhere they go, and even worse are the calls to take away some of our freedoms and rights every time one of these events happens based on a what amounts to a tragic but unavoidable minuscule problem.

Investing More Resources To Stop Mass Murder May Make Political Sense, But It Doesn’t Make Common Sense

Politicians, and the media that serves their political agenda, never put the problem in these perspectives. One side of the isle seizes on every tragic opportunity to call for diminishing the right of citizens to own various kinds of guns and impose other impediments on their Second Amendment rights. Both sides of the isle magnify the significance of the problem to make you feel more dependent on them and that more government, more useless laws which serve only to impede your freedom and more taxes to pay for it all is the solution.

The fact is that we are already spectacularly successful in controlling these mass murder events. They are an astoundingly rare occurrence in a free society of 326 million people. We have reached at least the threshold level of diminishing returns such that further investment in this problem will do more harm than good. Shouldn’t we put less emphasis on these events and more emphasis on more significant problems that are worthy of investing the scarce resources that we have and will add much more to the quality of our citizens’ lives?

Investing More Resources To Stop Mass Murder May Make Political Sense, But It Doesn’t Make Common Sense
Investing More Resources To Stop Mass Murder May Make Political Sense, But It Doesn’t Make Common Sense
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