Making a pitch for gun control, President Obama famously said of the church shooting in Charleston:
This type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.
Politifact accepted the challenge of
examining the extent to which this claim was true. Their finding: It isn't true. Hat tip to
Instapundit for the link.
The data shows that it clearly happens in other countries, and in at least three of them, there’s evidence that the rate of killings in mass-shooting events occurred at a higher per-capita rate than in the United States between 2000 and 2014. The only partial support for Obama’s claim is that the per-capita gun-incident fatality rate in the United States does rank in the top one-third of the list of 11 countries studied. On balance, we rate the claim Mostly False.
The three countries with higher per-capita rate of mass shootings are Norway, Finland, and Switzerland, every one a very developed country the DrsC visited during the summer just ended. And the data excludes any attack deemed "terrorism" like the
Charlie Hebdo shootings in France.
