By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
The FBI’s crime statistics on mass shootings are “politically biased” to make the incidents appear more common and deadly than they actually are, according to a criminologist.
John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News that the information is misleading and not substantiated by facts.
“The FBI put out a clearly incorrect set of numbers on public shootings shortly before the November election last year,” said Lott, a frequent opinion writer for FoxNews.com and author of “More Guns, Less Crime.” “I have been reading FBI reports for 30 years and I have never seen anything like this. It is one thing for the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the National Institute of Justice to put out politically biased studies, but there has always been a Chinese wall separating the FBI raw data collection from political pressures.”
Fox News said Lott’s group concluded there was a major flaw.
“The data was gleaned from news reports, and noted recent accounts were more accessible, and thus over-represented. Recent cases of the far more common ‘active shooting incidents’ were added to legitimate cases of mass shooting incidents, making the more recent years covered by the report appear to have a large increase in both mass shootings and deaths from them.”
