Kate Steinle Redux

On July 1st of last year, Kate Steinle was out with her parents on Pier 14 in San Francisco when she was shot and killed by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez.  Sanchez was illegally in the United States, a chronic 'undocumented worker' who had been deported 5 times.  You know, the border has never been more secure, so the administration has said on multiple occasions.  To make matters worse, San Francisco had declined to transfer Sanchez to ICE in March 2015 because San Francisco is a sanctuary city.  Sanchez only had 7 felony convictions.  No big deal, right?  And one wonders why Trump gets support for his border wall.

The Steinle story got a lot of press but the Woodburn triple homicide is getting a lot less press.  Yes, now it is Bonifacio Oseguera-Gonzalez who killed three and wounded one in Woodburn, Oregon.  Where Sanchez had been deported 5 times since 1994, Gonzalez had been deported 6 times since 2003!  You know, the border has never been more secure.

 

Why has the press been relatively quiet on this 'mass shooting?'  Simple.  It isn't easily converted into a call for gun control.  If it can't fit into the gun control narrative, the press is only too happy to ignore it.  That it plays into Trump's calls for more border security and deporting illegals doesn't help either.

Mass Shootings Way, Way Up Under Obama!

In December, I posted about the increase of mass shootings during the Obama Administration.  I used a spreadsheet provided by Mother Jones.  That spreadsheet has been updated but does not include last night's carnage at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando.  Let's explore the numbers.

Admin	Count	Dead	Wounded
Reagan	7	70	76
Bush I	7	63	52
Clinton	18	114	146
Bush II	15	127	91
Obama	33	247	229
Total	80	621	594

Even without including the 50+ dead from last night, Obama dominates the numbers.  However, this table is a bit skewed.  Bush I only served one term so his numbers are worse than they look.  Obama hasn't completed his second term and not quite comparable to his predecessors.  Let's break that down by month:

Admin	Dead	Wounded
Reagan	0.7	0.8
Bush I	1.3	1.1
Clinton	1.2	1.5
Bush II	1.3	0.9
Obama	2.8	2.6

Obama has another 7 months to go and the trend does not look good.

Obviously, if these two tables could have been produced where a Republican had such a high number compared to his Democrat predecessors, his policies would be blamed.  Even though the media would never do that here, is it the case?  Are Obama policies responsible for the dramatic increase in mass shootings?  I'm not sure if his actual policies are responsible but I think his expressed attitude is.  That is to say that Obama hasn't signed a law that made mass shootings easier or more frequent but he has not been a cheerleader for America or American power.  The United States under Obama is a nation in decline, a nation whose influence and reach is contracting.  Weakness invites attack.

Mass Shootings double Under Obama

I stumbled upon a fascinating spreadsheet compiled by Mother Jones.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data

Obviously, I am not a regular reader of Mother Jones but I must commend it for the logical and complete data that has been compiled.  As most of my co-workers know, there are few things that I like more than an Excel spreadsheet.  Data in a spreadsheet can reveal a great deal if pressed into a pivot table or sorted by one factor rather than another.  There is the opportunity to get subtotals for certain factors and then compare that to subtotals from another factor.

 

Mother Jones counts 73 mass shootings since 1982, slapping down the Washington Post's claim that San Bernardino was the 355th mass shooting just this year.  Of course, one must define the terms.  Mother Jones only included those incidents where 4 or more were killed and it wasn't gang or drug-related (i.e. the victims had no reason to expect they were at risk of being killed).  In those 73 mass shootings, 595 people were killed and 543 were injured.  The state with the most mass shootings is California (12), followed by Florida and Washington (6 each), then Texas (5).  When looking at the shooters, 43 of them showed prior signs of mental illness.  Those 43 shooters accounted for 63% of the fatalities and 71% of the injured.  In fact, the mentally ill had a higher average number killed (8.7 victims per shooting) than those who were not mentally ill (7.1 victims).

Now let's drift into unfair and unreasonable territory.  Yes, let's ask what portion of the carnage has happened since Hope and Change entered the White House.  It turns out that more than a third (26) of the mass shootings have occurred since President Obama was inaugurated.  There were only 15 mass shootings during the George W Bush administration, 18 during Clinton, and 7 each during Reagan and George Bush.  Let's consider fatalities per month.  Reagan saw 0.7 mass shooting fatalities per month during his two terms.  Bush I had 1.3, Clinton 1.2, Bush II 1.3, and Obama 2.7.  Wow!  The number of fatalities per month has more than doubled under Obama.  If there was this sort of rise with a Republican in the White House, it would be front page news and appearing on every newscast.

Now here is where we head into the tinfoil hat stuff.  This increase in frequency of mass shootings during the Obama Administration does - from his repeatedly stated perspective - add weight to the gun control message.  Some speculated that Fast and Furious was meant to get guns into the hands of bad actors, increase gun crime along the border, and provide an impetus for gun control.  The very idea reminds me of The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) in which a US intelligence agency plots an attack on America to increase next year's funding from Congress.  That doesn't really happen, right?