How many people does the average American know? A couple of studies I found in my deep, comprehensive research on which I spent 30 seconds says somewhere around 600. Sounds high to me, but I guess it depends on what the definition of “know” is. Sometimes, I wonder if I know my own family.
But let’s take that 600 number as reasonable. If it is, then according to University of Colorado researchers, you probably know somewhere around 40 people who have witnessed a mass shooting.
That seems high. I don’t know one. Nobody I know knows one. David Hogg has made a career out of being at the site of one, although whether he “witnessed” it depends on your definition since he only heard but didn’t see the shooting.
Four seconds of critical thinking and math tell me it is not at all possible that 17.3 million adults in the U.S. have witnessed a mass shooting. https://t.co/h9vJz8DYeL
— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) April 1, 2025
One of her podcast guests will be David Pyrooz, a professor of sociology and criminologist at the Institute for Behavioral Science at CU Boulder. His episode will break down his new study that came up with the data behind the 1 in 15, or about 7% of U.S. adults on average that have been at the scene of a mass shooting.
“It means you were in the direct vicinity to where you could see the shooter. There were bullets that were fired in your direction, or if you couldn’t directly see the shooter, that you could hear the gunshots,” Pyrooz said.
The study came to that number by surveying 10,000 people last year. The research also details that more than 2% of U.S. adults have been injured during a mass shooting.
Pyrooz explains, “Mass shootings, you know, I know they occur across the world, but, you know, in the United States, there’s just such a concerted interest and focus on it, and we should aim to understand this better.”
I must live in a very tiny bubble indeed if I have never met one of the more than 17 million witnesses to a mass shooting, which seems odd. Odd because I live in a neighborhood that has crime rates vastly higher than my suburban friends whose idea of crime–at least before the 2020 George Floyd riots led to the expansion of crime out of Minneapolis into the suburbs–was people littering or shoplifting in the malls.
I’ve had neighbors carjacked, and my next-door neighbor was the victim of a drive-by shooting. Yet nobody I know has ever spoken of witnessing a mass shooting. I guess they must be so common that it isn’t remarkable at all. The drive-by was the talk for days, but mass shootings go unremarked. They are no more remarkable, it seems, than snow in Minnesota.
Less, come to think about it. We talk about snow all the time here–mostly bitching–yet the mass shootings happening all around us not so much.
According to this truly fake study around 4 million Americans have been wounded at a mass shooting event
✨ JOURNALISM ✨ pic.twitter.com/KuSAZgVwEn
— Tom Buckley (@BullheadRanch) April 1, 2025
There is so much wrong with this “study” and stories like this that after a while it gets tiresome to point all idiocy out. First, the sleight of hand. When you and I think of mass shootings, we think of the big, splashy, unexpected events when a nutcase shoots at innocent people. But that accounts for the barest fraction of what is meant. 99.99% of “mass shootings” are gangbangers shooting at each other, which admittedly is bad–but hardly the same thing as what the CBS reporters want you to think.
“Multiskilled” reporters at that. If only I had such skills in abundance.
In fact, the story went into great detail about the broken lives left behind after a random shooting, ignoring the fact that such shootings, while awful, are vanishingly rare. The typical victim of a “mass shooting” is a lifetime criminal in a gang war, and even then very few people are actually killed.
The same trick is played with the statistics on “children” getting murdered by guns. Almost every single “child” killed is a teenager in a gang, yet we are constantly told that kids in America are dropping like flies due to our gun culture. Try gang culture, guys.
But forget all the messy facts and get back to the bottom line that CBS and these university “researchers” are selling–that one out of 15 Americans have witnessed a mass shooting.
How can anybody believe that? Are people incapable of doing a gut check? And if so, what is wrong with our education system that they cannot do basic math to realize that the statistic is as plausible as the moon being made of cheese?
We all know the answer to that last question: our school systems suck, and our media works assiduously to dumb down, propagandize, brainwash, and eventually lobotomize our citizenry. We elevate emotion, prioritize anti-resilience (being incapable of dealing with minor setbacks or upsets), and attack people who question the Narrative™.
Stupid people are easier to control, so our establishment works hard to keep people stupid.
What keeps people from recoiling when they hear nonsense is common sense, and common sense is the target of the left. That is one of the key reasons why they keep forcing people to accept idiocies like alphabet ideology. If you condition people to recoil at the most basic common sensical ideas such as “there are two sexes,” you can condition people to believe anything.
And that, my friends, is one of the fundamental goals of critical theory. Get you to the point where you accept obvious nonsense as real because the only legitimate source of truth is what you are told by your betters.
