After the mass murder of 10 in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket committed by a man who posted a racist manifesto, Wesley Lowery, a CBS reporter, said: “Let’s be clear, the stuff Tucker (Carlson) and Laura Ingraham say every night, it could be written by white supremacists very often. In this manifesto, the gunman talks about how “People will always affirm diversity as strength”. What makes it a strength? Tucker could clearly hear Tucker saying it. This is what he says all the time. The Ben Shapiros around the globe say the opposite. … Many people are involved in politics or media who promote these ideas. … We have to have a conversation about our political rhetoric in our country, right?”
What’s the best place to begin? This “reporter” implies that “right-wing rhetoric” incited the 18-year-old Buffalo supermarket killer. What evidence is there? We don’t know if he was a regular viewer of CBS News.
One victim was killed and five others were injured in the attack on an Orange County church by an Asian man. According to reports, most of the victims were of Taiwanese heritage. The shooter reportedly DVR-ed Tucker Carlson shows every day. A black man who hated Asians was later arrested after inflicting injuries on three Korean Americans during a shooting attack in Dallas’ hair salon.
Lowery implies that “right-wing rhetoric” turns white males into mass killers. The facts are the problem with Lowery’s narrative. In terms of mass killers, nearly all of them are men, the facts show that white men are underrepresented while black men are more than half of American men.
September 2017 Newsweek, in a story headlined “White Men Have Committed More Mass Shootings than Any Other Group,” wrote, “Statistics show that since 1982, the majority of mass shootings — 54 percent — were committed by white men, according to data from Mother Jones.” But a few paragraphs later it added, “The high number of white men committing mass shootings is also explained, at least in part, by the fact white people make up a majority of the U.S. population (63 percent) and men are more likely to commit violent crime in general.” Wait, white males commit 54% of the mass shootings while the white population is 63%?
About the Newsweek article, PolitiFact said: “Critics argue that when you consider that non-Hispanic white men make up about 63 percent of the male population, white men appear proportionally less likely to commit a mass shooting, according to the Mother Jones statistics showing white men account for 54 percent of mass shootings.”
Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor, noted that between 1982 and 2021 blacks and Asians committed 17.4% (12.3%) and 6.6% (3.6%of the population), respectively, in mass shootings. Volokh wrote, “Non-Hispanic whites don’t seem to commit mass shootings at greater than their share of the population. The groups that appear overrepresented are blacks and Asians.”
In 2008, an opinion piece in The Washington Post called “The Numbers Undercut Myths About Mass Shootings and White Men” found: “So it appears that the number of white men committing these crimes is close to what we’d expect from pure chance, maybe even slightly lower — the opposite of what we’d see if white supremacy culture were at fault.”
Another fact that is troubling, white males are not represented in mass shooting as a percent of American men. Black males and Asian males are both overrepresented in mass shooters, based on their proportion of the male population. The left-wing media hyperventilate about “underrepresentation” or “overrepresentation” when it comes to poverty, prison population, admission to elite colleges and universities, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, NFL head coaches or Academy Award winners. But when it comes to mass shooters, suddenly “over-representation” becomes irrelevant.
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