If We Classified Drive‑By Shootings as Mass Shootings, Guess Who’d Be Leading?

Spoiler Alert: It Ain’t Whitey McWhiterson

We’ve been sold a cartoon of gun violence: white shooters, white victims, white suburbs, and an obsessive focus on school tragedies unless the shooter is trans. The data tells another story entirely. When you count every shooting by the same rule, the so‑called “mass shooting epidemic” looks nothing like what politicians, the media, and bureaucrats want you to believe.

Every year, Americans are told that the nation is drowning in mass shootings. Yet the crisis on television looks nothing like the crisis in police reports. The images we see: pale faces, suburban schools, candlelight vigils, all come from an edited reality in which the victims who fit America’s newsrooms narrative count, and the victims who don’t are filed under “gang violence.” If we used the government’s own numeric threshold, four or more people shot, but removed the political asterisk that excludes drive‑bys, the geography of “mass shootings” would shift overnight from the suburbs to the inner city.

The United States sees roughly 2,000 drive‑by shootings each year, injuring or killing nearly 3,000 people. About a third wound multiple victims; five hundred separate events that would qualify as mass shootings under the same definition applied to suburban massacres. In Chicago, more people are shot in multi‑victim drive‑bys each summer than die in all the school or workplace shootings broadcast nationwide. Yet none of them appear in the mass‑shooting tallies cited by politicians, because bureaucrats quietly add a clause: “excluding gang or drug incidents.” One rule for the urban poor; another for everyone else.

This selective arithmetic produces what might be called the White narrative of gun violence. When the shooter is White, we get psychological speculation, community sorrow, and congressional hearings. When the victims are White, the nation lowers its flags. But when the shooters and victims are Black or Hispanic young men from gutted neighborhoods, the story becomes invisible; no names, no profiles, just statistical noise. A culture that claims to care about equality has built an emotional hierarchy of death.

Over the last decade, about 45 percent of all firearm homicides occurred in just 2 percent of Democrat controlled U.S. counties, overwhelmingly in minority districts long abandoned by competent governance. Classifying those crimes honestly would expose how decades of failed Democrat policy destroyed the very communities liberal politicians now use as moral backdrops. It is easier to moralize about one deranged White gunman in a school than to confront thousands of predictable killings born of bureaucratic neglect. That is why we redefine the problem instead of solving it.

The remedy starts with counting every victim equally. Until we do, the phrase “mass shooting” will remain what it has become: a political brand built on selective empathy rather than a mirror of American reality.

The Anatomy of the Deception

In politics, language plays the same role as currency in finance: it disguises value behind a symbol. Whoever defines the vocabulary of debate controls the moral ledger, and nowhere is that clearer than in how officials have defined a mass shooting.

The FBI’s original threshold from the 1980s classified a mass murder as four or more people killed in one event. This wording automatically excluded the vast majority of drive-bys, where the wounded often outnumber the dead. “Independent” research groups later broadened the term to four or more shot, but Congress retained the fine print, excluding incidents “associated with gang activity or narcotics trade.” That single sentence turned a national epidemic into a selective one.

Consider Chicago. The city logged over 2,450 shooting incidents in 2023; 470 involved four or more victims. Only five met the federal mass‑shooting definition because the rest were “gang‑related.” Those 465 omitted events left about 1,300 victims invisible to national summaries. Los Angeles reveals the same pattern. LAPD reported 312 drive‑by events during 2023; 37 had four or more victims. None appeared in the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ “mass‑shooting” table. By the arithmetic of exclusion, a four‑victim attack in a strip mall is a national emergency while a four‑victim attack in Compton is an annotation.

This is not an accident; the distortion serves powerful interests.

First, it protects Democrat politicians. Federal lawmakers can trade responsibility for sympathy, demanding new national gun restrictions — symbolic, unworkable, and photogenic — without confronting the municipal rot that makes nightly violence possible. Confronting that decay would mean challenging the city administrations, prosecutors, and public‑sector unions that anchor their own party’s power. It is safer to hold a press conference about an AR‑15 than to reform a district attorney’s office that releases repeat offenders.

Second, it benefits mainstream media because tragedy sells better when it looks familiar. A suburban high school with grieving parents and yearbook photos appeals to the national conscience far more than a dimly lit street corner in Baltimore. That bias isn’t malice, it’s marketing. The average American sees hundreds of hours of coverage for each White school victim and barely seconds for children killed in drive‑bys whose names never reach a television screen.

Third, liberal advocacy groups ride the same wave. A vague “mass‑shooting epidemic” keeps donations flowing to national causes with abstract goals, while the local mentors and community patrols who could actually stop urban carnage scrape by on shoestring budgets. Fear pays better than competence.

The linguistic barrier functions as political armor. When researchers at Northeastern University cross‑checked the Gun Violence Archive with local police blotters for 2022, they found 2,182 incidents in which four or more people were shot. Only 363 appeared in official federal compilations. The remaining 1,819 were filtered out. Seven out of ten multi‑victim shootings vanish through bureaucratic vocabulary alone.

The result is a moral sleight of hand. Every graph of “rising mass shootings” derives its slope from these definitional shifts, not necessarily a change in reality. In a society that pretends to value data, the manipulation of definitions becomes the purest form of deceit.

The Human Cost: When Averages Replace Names

Numbers make it easy not to feel anything. You can fit two dead teenagers and a wounded grandmother into a spreadsheet cell, call it “three injuries,” and move on. The language of statistics is a perfect anesthetic. But in the neighborhoods where the numbers come from, people know precisely what every digit costs.

Chicago ended 2023 with a little more than seven hundred homicides. Roughly two‑thirds were drive‑by shootings. The victims were almost all young Black or Hispanic men, most under twenty‑five. Los Angeles logged over three hundred drive‑by attacks. Nine hundred people were wounded. Dozens dead. But read the official reports and you’ll see bland phrases like “gang‑related incident, ongoing investigation.” That’s bureaucratic shorthand for we’ve given up.

Walk those streets and you figure out quick what the numbers never show. The grandmother is sleeping on the couch because stray rounds cut through the back wall. The mother who makes her boys finish their homework on the kitchen floor, away from windows. The kid flinching at fireworks every Fourth of July. None of them end up on CNN. They just carry the noise inside their heads while the rest of the country debates magazine capacities.

Drive‑by victims are erased twice: once physically, again statistically. The first time by a bullet. The second by the way data gets sanitized. The difference between a televised mass shooting and the ones that happen every weekend isn’t moral weight; it’s marketing value. The system doesn’t just fail to protect these communities; it actively harms them. It fails to see them.

Thomas Sowell wrote that social theories are judged by how virtuous they sound, not how well they work. That’s the sickness here. We talk about “addressing root causes,” hold a vigil, and call it progress. Meanwhile, the root keeps rotting. The same shooters, the same corners, the same funerals. Every year, the paperwork gets thicker and the neighborhoods thinner.

The Reckoning: Count Everyone or Count No One

If every shooting that injured four or more people were counted equally, without the bureaucratic footnotes about “gang motive,” the picture of American violence would change overnight. It would not be an epidemic of lone madmen in classrooms. It would be organized neglect, measurable and political.

Arithmetic embarrasses rhetoric. Older FBI ‘mass‑murder’ definition produced about 50 events a year; newer 4+‑shot definitions produce roughly 650. Include drive‑bys that hit the same threshold, and the total exceeds 2,000. These are not isolated explosions of hate. They are the sustained heartbeat of municipal failure.

Honest counting would collapse several myths at once. It would show that the United States doesn’t have a gun crisis spread evenly across its landscape. It has concentrated zones of social collapse where law is ornamental. It would trace the violence not to rifle racks in rural counties but to the hollowed‑out downtowns that political machines have ruled for half a century. It would be a spreadsheet of failure with signatures attached.

The truth is not hidden by complexity but by cowardice. The institutions pretending to seek “solutions” already hold the data; they just refuse to use it because the story dishonors them. Honest counting would be revolutionary. Every bureaucrat’s abstraction, “gun violence,” “community trauma,” would translate into a name and address. The public could trace each death to a policy: which judges released repeat shooters, which mayors cut police budgets, which federal programs rewarded failure.

Thomas Sowell also said that intellectuals measure success by intentions, not results. We built an entire moral bureaucracy on that error. We speak of “systemic injustice” as though the system were an abstraction when it is simply a chain of officials who stopped enforcing the law.

The argument for honest arithmetic is the argument for adulthood. Pretending that four people killed in a cul‑de‑sac matter differently from four killed on a corner is moral segregation by another name. The gun knows no demographic and neither should the data.

The choice is simple. We can go on performing compassion in front of cameras while tolerating a quiet civil war beneath them, or we can start counting honestly and endure the shame that follows. The first path keeps power intact and cemeteries full. The second might finally match rhetoric to reality.

Count everyone or count no one. The future of the republic will turn on which arithmetic we choose.

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