Politi-Fiction.com

My Mama Always Said That 

Statistics Is Like An Onion... 

Forrest Gump

I was reading Breitbart, which I do not do often, since ideologues think slowly and tend to bore me.
So I read:
Serial Lies: PolitiFact Blasts Obama Over Gun Claim About Mass Killings In Other Countries
by John Nolte22 Jun 2015
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/06/22/serial-lies-politifact-blasts-obama-over-claim-about-mass-killings-in-other-countries/

[...]

Just hours after a racist terror attack took the lives of nine black parishioners guilty of nothing more than attending Bible study at a Charleston, South Carolina, church, Obama stood before America and did what he usually does when standing before America: He cynically exploited a tragedy to further his political agenda, and he lied:

“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.”

That statement is such a brazen and provable lie that even the left-wing PolitiFact couldn’t find a way to turn it into anything but a “Mostly False.”

Still, using this data, it’s easy to dispense with the first claim Obama made — that “this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

Over the decade and a half studied, the researchers found 23 incidents of mass shootings in the other 10 countries, resulting in 200 dead and 231 wounded. In the United States over the same period, there were 133 incidents that left 487 dead and 505 wounded. …

[T]he U.S. doesn’t rank No. 1. At 0.15 mass shooting fatalities per 100,000 people, the U.S. had a lower rate than Norway (1.3 per 100,000), Finland (0.34 per 100,000) and Switzerland (1.7 per 100,000)...

,

Since I sort of agreed with Mr. Obama's point, I thought that I had better check this matter out, because maybe I was mistaken. However, I was also acutely and painfully aware that the statistical analysis outlined above did not jibe with what I heard when the President spoke.

I heard, " ... this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency."
This is seemingly what Breitbart's Mr. Nolte heard, and one must assume it is what PolitiFact heard.

I interpreted this statement of Mr. Obama's on the fly as meaning approximately the following:
(1) "this type of mass violence"  means something like a killing spree involving at least 2 or more victims, and the victims are not all members of the same family, and
(2) one is not talking about a war zone, and
(3) such sprees happen with a greater "frequency" in the USA.

Since the punctuation of the spoken word is hard to see, what I heard Mr. Obama say is,

"This type of mass shooting, comprised of a number of deaths of non-related people, happens frequently in the USA, and that rate is much greater than mass shootings appear in other advanced countries."

So I was somewhat surprised at seeing statistics about "fatalities per 100,000 people";  one good-sized killer clown carnival spree of death taking down a hundred peeps or so and occurring in a country of small population would send the fatalities per 100,000 skyrocketing, while a desperate drudgery of mini-sprees only managing to kill 3 or four people in a country of great population would find its "fatalities per 100,000" stat positively running in place.

PolitiFact has:
Is Barack Obama correct that mass killings don't happen in other countries?
By Keely Herring, Louis Jacobson on Monday, June 22nd, 2015 at 10:54 a.m.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/22/barack-obama/barack-obama-correct-mass-killings-dont-happen-oth/

It is a pretty good discussion, although it does start out with the straw man that "mass killings do not occur in other countries", which I guess was a criticism that the dumber critics of Mr. Obama picked up on.

It comes down to a judgement call, and PolitiFact quite badly handles that one.
It says,

EDITOR’S NOTE, June 22, 2015: We heard from several of you regarding Obama's use of the word "frequency," and that frequency could refer to the incidents of mass shootings, not deaths as we examined. Looking at Obama's claim by incident, the United States has a higher rate of incidents than Finland, Norway and Switzerland. We agree that there is no preferred comparison and each is valid, and we've changed some language in this article to reflect that. We also agree that China has a larger population than the United States, a fact we weren't initially clear about but have since fixed. That said, we are sticking with our rating of Mostly False, in large measure because of Obama's claim that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries." That is incorrect. We know some of you will disagree, and we'll be sure to air out some of your objections in our next reader mailbag.

This is nonsense, and again it seems to be based on a faulty interpretation of what the emphasis lay on what was being said.

If Mr. Obama said and meant that such mass violence does not occur in other advanced countries, period, full stop, no grey areas; then he was grossly mistaken, and there is nothing really to talk about. Certainly there is no need for this statistical rigamarole.

If, however, Mr. Obama meant something else, the most obvious interpretation is that he meant what he said about frequency, not fatalities per 100,000.

Having said this, we are left with the sentence I put into italics above:

"We also agree that China has a larger population than the United States, a fact we weren't initially clear about but have since fixed."

and that is a troubling sentence.

I have a feeling that this was a master plot by The Onion.

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