Obama: No nation on earth comes near the mass violence of the United States -- True or False?

President Obama’s assertion on Monday that “No nation on earth comes near” the proportions of the mass violence problem of the United States is false. The Crime Prevention Research Center has made an exhaustive study of the incidence of mass killings, following the FBI definition excluding incidents that kill fewer than four people and gang fights over turf, or incidences of authentic guerrilla war. By these standards, covering from 1998 to 2015, and 53 attacks and 57 shooters within the United States and 2,354 attacks and over 4,800 shooters in the rest of the world, the U.S. accounts for 1.49 percent of the world’s killings, 2.2 percent of the attacks, and 1.15 percent of the public shooters, although the United States has 4.6 percent of the world’s total population. Out of the 97 countries rated, the United States ranked 64th in attacks and 65th in fatalities. And the other countries compared were not the world’s 96 least organized and civilized national jurisdictions. 

Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and France, the first three very high standard of living countries, all have at least 25 percent more mass killings per capita than the United States. The other 96 countries as a group, including relatively very nonviolent countries such as Canada, Australia, and Singapore, have had a rate of increase in mass killings that is 291 percent higher than that of the United States.

There is no reason to allow the facts to get in the way when you want to make gun ownership as nearly impossible as it is in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.  One has to wonder why Obama and the Democrats generally want to set up conditions in the USA that will lead to increases in the overall level of gun violence one should expect upon emulating the gun laws of these Democrat-controlled violent cities.

For now most of the discussion is about withholding gun ownership from the mentally ill.  How will that work when the Democrats are already saying that not only are people who voted for Trump the Deplorables, but that they must be insane people.  Or, recall that the American Psychiatric Association classified many homosexuals as suffering from sexual orientation disturbance until 1987.  Can law enforcement across the breadth of the USA be counted on not classifying homosexuals as disturbed individuals?  Or can we be sure that rational egoists will not be described as suffering from anti-social disturbance?  Or that so-called white males will be said to suffer from white patriarchal disturbance?  At least in some parts of our country, these would seem to be quite possible outcomes down the road just a bit.  It behooves us to be very, very wary.