The shootings yesterday and today in El Paso and Dayton have, of course, redoubled the commitment of Democrats to something called “gun control”. This is nothing more than another instance of the left’s penchant for magical thinking.

The root of the problem isn’t a lack of “gun control”, it’s a lack of self-control — a lack that has become endemic to America since the 1960s. As I say in “Mass Murder: Reaping What Was Sown“, that lack is caused by (among other things):

• governmental incentives to act irresponsibly, epitomized by the murder of unborn children as a form of after-the-fact birth control, and more widely instituted by the vast expansion of the “social safety net”

• treatment of bad behavior as an illness (with a resulting reliance on medications), instead of putting a stop to it and punishing it

• the erosion and distortion of the meaning of justice, beginning with the virtual elimination of the death penalty, continuing on to the failure to put down and punish riots, and culminating in the persecution and prosecution of persons who express the “wrong” opinions

• governmental encouragement and subsidization of the removal of mothers from the home to the workplace

• the decline of two-parent homes and the rise of illegitimacy

• the complicity of government officials who failed to enforce existing laws and actively promoted leniency in their enforcement (see this and this, for example).

It is therefore

entirely reasonable to suggest that mass murder … is of a piece with violence in America, which increased rapidly after 1960s and has been contained only by dint of massive incarceration. Violence in general and mass-murder in particular flow from the subversion and eradication of civilizing social norms, which began in earnest in the 1960s. The numbers bear me out.

Drawing on Wikipedia, I compiled a list of 317 incidents of mass murder in the United States from the early 1800s through 2017….

These graphs are derived from the consolidated list of incidents:

The vertical scale is truncated to allow for a better view of the variations in the casualty rate. In 1995, there were 869 casualties in 3 incidents (an average of 290); about 850 of the casualties resulted from the Oklahoma City bombing.

The federal assault weapons ban — really a ban on the manufacture of new weapons of certain kinds — is highlighted because it is often invoked as the kind of measure that should be taken to reduce the incidence of mass murders and the number of casualties they produce. Even Wikipedia — which is notoriously biased toward the left — admits (as of today) that “the ban produced almost no significant results in reducing violent gun crimes and was allowed to expire.”

There is no compelling, contrary evidence in the graphs. The weapons-ban “experiment” was too limited in scope and too-short lived to have had any appreciable effect on mass murder. For one thing, mass-murderers are quite capable of using weapons other than firearms. The years with the three highest casualty rates (second graph) are years in which most of the carnage was caused by arson (1958) and bombing (1995 and 2013).

The most obvious implication of this analysis is found in the upper graph. The incidence of mass murders was generally declining from the early 1900s to the early 1960s. Then all hell broke loose.

I rest my case.

(See also “Reductio ad Sclopetum, or Getting to the Bottom of ‘Gun Control’“, “‘This Has to Stop’“, and “Utilitarianism vs. Liberty“, especially UTILITARIANISM AND GUN CONTROL VS. LIBERTY.)