On last week’s post about mass shootings, the local master of gelato asked a pertinent question about mass killings, “What happens to the time line if you add the FBI definition of 4+” and another friend asked what happens if we broaden our scope to consider all the mass killings regardless of how they were performed. Well, I’ll tell you what happens: It ruins my whole damned afternoon. Reading through at least the summary paragraph on every incident listed on the wiki under mass murder in the United States is the sort of thing that you only want to do when you’re already feeling really shitty about life in general and your own life in particular. If you were felling upbeat about anything, leafing through these particular pages of American history will take it right out of you.
Ok, so the green line is the cumulative number of incidents over time, starting (arbitrarily) at exactly one hundred years ago. The nearly exponential shape of that curve can be explained in one of several ways, I’m going to put forward three hypotheses here:
- Earlier events are less likely to be perpetrated, for unknown reasons.
- Earlier events are less likely to be detected, because law enforcement was primarily localized, relatively unconnected by telephony, intrastate bureaucracies, and interstate law enforcement agencies.
- Earlier events are less likely to be reported, and even if reported in a local paper they are less likely to be included in this particular voluntarily curated data set.
I’m personally leaning toward the last of these possibilities, but I’m open to anything at this point. Your thoughts?
