Another White Male Perpetrates a Another Mass Shooting

IME people can get extremely angry when embarrassed by a situation that publicly highlights their own antisocial behaviour. The more they know they are doing something bad, the more their guilt drives their anger.

A person who genuinely believed that masks were pointless or unnecessary wouldn’t get worked up about other people wearing them.

But if you know there’s good, socially responsible reasons to wear masks but you aren’t going to wear one - for whatever reason - then other people wearing masks make you feel bad about yourself. And that causes anger.

I don’t think your use of statistics is correct. If you are limiting yourself to looking at males, you would need to compare them to the percentage of black/white males to the population of males, not population as a whole.

That makes sense. I don’t really know how to correct for it. Stats was always my worst math class.

Given I’m just assuming a 50/50 male female split I don’t think that this is true. I guess if I was using the real number it would make a difference but I can’t imagine that it would make a difference to the overall analysis. At most we’d be adjusting the populations 10% relative to each other which doesn’t seem like it would move the top line numbers.

I think we should definitely make a lot of premature generalizations that confirm our existing political axes-to-grind based on the ethnic background of this shooter. Absolutely no way that will backfire on anyone.

The Colorado shooter has been named as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa of Arvada, Colorado. Details to follow.

Hahahahaha. Well played, sir.

For ease of reference, here’s an article about the arrest from the Daily Beast

Yeah, I think that this is the difference. The definition of mass shooting that those collecting crime data use is 4 or more people killed without a cooling off period. So a attack on a rival gang, or a murder suicide of a family could count. But the mass shootings that make the headlines and which terrify people are the indiscriminate mass shooting which aren’t specifically targeting specific individuals, but whose purpose are just to spread mayhem. I think making that distinction would move the stats in the more caucasian direction.

Especially if one doesn’t exclude Muslim Caucasians…

That’s possible. The only actual data that anyone in this thread has put forward is @snowthx’s link, which doesn’t seem to skew Caucasian, but also doesn’t break down the type of mass shooting.

But then it seems like a zero-sum game. If “white” men are disproportionately more likely to engage in rampage shootings, that means they’re disproportionately less likely to engage in gang-related shootings, family destruction murder-suicides, and so forth, since their total share of all mass shootings is roughly in line with their share of the population. Of course, it’s also possible that rampage shootings like the one that touched off this thread are so rare compared to mass shootings in general that “white” men are disproportionately responsible for them while not affecting their overall share of mass shootings in general to a significant degree.

Also, if we’re only looking at “ideological” shootings, I suspect it may make a difference in the numbers whether men of Arab, North African, and Southwest Asian descent count as “white”.

I once saw a line which went “the sneakiest thing about women drivers is the way they turn out to be men just after you’ve criticized their driving to your wife”.

Most of the people like this are failures. They don’t do well in the world because of their flaws.

They can either acknowledge that they have flaws and they are the reason for their failure in life. Or they can deny that they are the cause of their own failure and blame the world for their problems. Those who decide the world is attacking them can turn around and attack the world; whether by voting for somebody who will make their enemies cry, by tearing masks off people, or by shooting people in a shopping center.

You can’t be Muslim and Caucasian . . . by definition!

Might make people rethink the outrage surrounding Rachel Dolezal … but it won’t.

What about all of Azerbaijan?

You can’t get any more Caucasian than Chechens :smiley:

ETA: I know you were joking. Not sure about asterion…

One thing I did was look at the Mother Jones database referenced to see if number killed or injured was different proportionally from share of events (in other words, are white mass shootings more deadly?).

The answer is “no and yes”. Fatalities by white shooters make up 59.5% of the overall population, still roughly in line with % white in the US, but white shooters lead to 77.6% of those injured.

Could be a statistical anomaly, could be a result of the type of weapon used (there were 63 different types of weapon/mix of types in the dataset, and I don’t know enough to classify them).

Anyway, link to CSV:
US Mass Shootings, 1982-2021: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation – Mother Jones

You just know Fox News got the biggest boner when the shooter’s name was revealed as Ahmed. Now they can cover it non-stop instead of ignoring or downplaying it.

Let’s see… “Biden has been president for 2 months, and already Muslim terrorism is on the rise! This didn’t happen when Trump was president”. “Atlanta shootings? What Atlanta shootings? Let’s go back to the Muslim that murdered 10 in Colorado, including a cop”

Caliber and powder load matter (why we talk about pistol vs rifle rounds, after all), and I suppose it’s possible that using something chambered in .223 and fired quickly might cause more injuries and fewer deaths than other calibers or actions. So it could be the case that more white male shooters prefer something in the mode of the AR-15 platform and have it as the main or only weapon. More grazing and non-lethal hits by throwing more metal. Remember that the Virginia Tech shooting was done with a Glock 19 and a Walther P22, which are a 9 mm and a .22 LR pistol respectively.

Yup. I saw a tweet this morning that of the major “news networks” Fox News was the only one to not have coverage of the Boulder PDs press conference last night.

Just wanted to say what a good and sensible reply this was.