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There have been several claims in the media that white men are more likely to commit mass murders. I've seen rather strong evidence that the vast majority of these crimes are committed by men, so I don't doubt this part of the claim. On the other hand, I haven't seen any non-dubious statistics for the racial aspect of the claim. Are white people more likely to commit mass murder than those of other races?

Sklivvz
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  • I know the site frowns on Wikipedia as a primary source, so I'm making this a comment. This graph suggests that, in the United States, it has been true in recent decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ethnicity_of_U.S._rampage_killers.png – Larry OBrien May 30 '14 at 17:30
  • How do you define "mass murder"? For example, the FBI definition is "*murdering four or more persons during an event with no cooling-off period between the murders*", but others have used 6 killings as a basis, etc. Also, the Wiki link in above comment is for "rampage killings", which has a [different definition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers), partially based on injury count in addition to deaths. Mass murder perpetrated by a nation/state may also be counted differently than those carried out by individuals. – Is Begot May 30 '14 at 20:01
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    @Geobits: I don't have a specific definition in mind, I'm just interested in whether the claim is valid under any reasonable definition – Casebash May 30 '14 at 23:22
  • @Articuno: The claim is that white men are more likely to commit murder. The men part is backed by statistics, but I haven't seen statistics justifying the racial component – Casebash May 30 '14 at 23:25
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    @LarryOBrien: Wikipedia lists 52/75 or 69%. According to Wikipedia, the white population is 72% or 64% excluding Hispanics who identify as white. An effect that modest could be simply due to modelling. We know that people are more likely to copy people similar to them and numerically most of the perpetrators are white and the media explicitly makes this link – Casebash May 30 '14 at 23:35
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    I've added the United-States tag for two reasons: (1) the linked reference talks about white male privilege in the context the "sense of belonging", which is not going to apply (as strongly) in countries where caucasians are in the minority, so I don't think the claim is global. (2) On the other hand, if the claim is intended to be global, there is a huge confounding factor of in which countries the populace have access to rampage weapons. – Oddthinking May 31 '14 at 01:29
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    is it fair to say that in a country where the population is mostly white most serial killers will be white? In other words, the number of people of a specific population reflects the makeup of the population as a whole. – stephen Oct 04 '15 at 20:17
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    @stephen the answer below basically agrees with your thought. about 71% were white, and the average white population is at about 70%, so it appears that we have mass murderers in proportion to race. – Himarm Oct 05 '15 at 20:38
  • I like that, in the answers, a distinction is being made between "are white people more likely to commit," vs "are mass murders more likely to be committed by" - VERY different concepts. – PoloHoleSet Jan 03 '17 at 21:24
  • In the most recent case, the shooter owned over 40 guns. That's a lot of money spent on guns. Poor people cannot afford to own 40 guns. I wonder whether that affects statistics. – gnasher729 Oct 04 '17 at 17:52
  • [The best writeup I've seen on the issue.](http://amp.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/10/what_the_white_mass_shooter_myth_gets_right_and_wrong_about_killers_demographics.html) Good reasoning and points to statistical data. –  Oct 07 '17 at 03:26
  • Are we asking if (A) any given white person has a greater chance of being a mass murderer than any given non-white person, on average? Or (B) for any given mass murder, is it more likely to be a white person or non-white? – PoloHoleSet Aug 22 '18 at 19:16
  • It should be noted that there are some countries (for example Sweden) who for whatever reasons do not disclose the ethnicity of criminals, e.g. https://www.thelocal.se/20180508/why-sweden-doesnt-keep-stats-on-ethnic-background-and-crime and things like this could very well affect the statistics. – Owl Oct 03 '18 at 10:47
  • Who's going to ask, "*Are black people more likely to commit murders?*" – RonJohn Jun 02 '19 at 17:40

2 Answers2

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We identified a total of 28 mass murderers who fit the criteria for inclusion [male mass murderers in the U.S. since 1970]. [...] 71.4% were White, 14.3% were African American, and another 14.3% were some other race (Asian, Arab, and Native American).

Kennedy-Kollar, Deniese and Charles, Christopher A. D., Hegemonic Masculinity and Mass Murderers in the United States (December 26, 2013). Southwest Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 8(2), 2013. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2372128

This only shows that given a mass murderer, they are more likely to be white.

From the chart and references here, white people made up 87.5% of the U.S. population in 1970, 83.1% in 1980, 80.3% in 1990, 75.1% in 2000, and 72.4% of in 2010.

71.4% of mass murderers being white is not an over-representation of whites.

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    Control group! Control group! What was the distribution of the American population at the time? – Oddthinking May 31 '14 at 03:05
  • @Oddthinking I haven't drawn any conclusions from these numbers yet. –  May 31 '14 at 03:05
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    @Oddthinking Alright, now I did :) Thoughts? –  May 31 '14 at 03:20
  • @Oddthinking 72.4% in 2010 is still insanely high. – Velda May 31 '14 at 03:42
  • @Velda: I've missed your point. Articuno: Ah, sorry for jumping in too early. Much better. – Oddthinking May 31 '14 at 03:45
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    Your white American stats include arabs as white yet the killing stats don't. You need comparable statistics. – William Grobman May 31 '14 at 15:10
  • @WilliamGrobman Thanks. I didn't notice that. Can you point me to where that is documented for the stats I presented? –  Jun 01 '14 at 00:52
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    Your quote from the shooting stats includes Arabs as part of the other category. The linked Wikipedia article on White Americans: *It includes people who indicated their race(s) as "White" or reported entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian"[4] and so is a wider group than European American.* – William Grobman Jun 01 '14 at 02:00
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    You may want stats on European Americans as that seems to match the mass shooting stats but I have not actually checked that source for their definition. – William Grobman Jun 01 '14 at 02:02
  • What is the statistical significance of this difference? What is the probability that these percentages would occur if it were completely random? – gerrit Jun 05 '14 at 15:33
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    @gerrit Assuming that the stats are comparable (right now, they aren't... I'm going to fix that), your question about statistical significance of the difference depends on the null hypothesis. Given than the question asks if white are *more likely* to commit mass murder, a one-sided null hypothesis makes sense. I.e. The null hypothesis is that white people are *not* more likely to commit mass murder. Under this null hypothesis, we would observe a test statistic at least as extreme as this more than 50% of the time. Therefore, no reason to reject the null hypothesis. –  Jun 05 '14 at 16:14
  • @Articuno Do we need more mass murderers...? – gerrit Jun 05 '14 at 16:15
  • @gerrit (Continuing my previous comment.) If you're asking, about whether whites are actually *under*-represented in the population of mass murderers (since 71.4% is less than any of the proportions obtained in censuses through 2010), that would be a one-sided test the other direction. Specifically, a one-sided [binomial test](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_test). I can work that out, but I think it makes sense to wait until we/I track down stats that actually use the same criteria for "white". –  Jun 05 '14 at 16:18
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    @gerrit *Do we need more mass murderers* - If we set the critical p-value at 0.05, a sample size of 28 only allows us to reject the null hypothesis for differences greater than 3% (approximately). So, 28 mass murderers would not be enough to detect a difference in proportion of less than 3%. –  Jun 05 '14 at 16:24
  • @gerrit Correction... my power calculation is pretty off (I'll correct it later), but your point still stands... 28 mass murderers *may* not be enough to be able to detect a difference in proportions if the true difference is too small. –  Jun 05 '14 at 22:22
  • @Articuno Did you ever get a chance to find comparable statistics? – William Grobman Aug 09 '14 at 07:01
  • Do the mass-killer statistics count White as European + Hispanic white + (as mentioned by William) Arabic white, as this answer does, or are they counted separately? What we traditionally think of as "white," European white, was at 69% in 2000, and 63.7% in 2010. – PoloHoleSet Oct 02 '17 at 18:57
  • @PoloHoleSet The article http://www.swacj.org/swjcj/archives/8.2/Article%204%20Hegemonic%20Masculinity%20and%20Mass%20Murders%20in%20the%20US.pdf specifically excludes "arabs" from the white category. There is no indication that "Hispanic" is being treated as a race in the article. The "72.4%" white population figure for 2010 is the number of people who say they are only one race and say the race is "white". This census instructions say "Hispanic origins are not races", but 6.2% of people say they are "some other race", which (improperly) includes some white Hispanics. – DavePhD Oct 04 '17 at 16:38
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No. An answer on Politics.SE quotes from Wikipedia:

according to a database compiled by Mother Jones, the race of the shooters is proportionate to the overall US population, although Asians are overrepresented and Latinos underrepresented.

This includes way more mass shootings than the other answer.

This is based on data from Mother Jones as reported at CNN:

"If you look at the whole list, it turns out that whites and blacks are pretty proportionate to their population, very close," said Dave Cullen, author of the book "Columbine," which tells the story of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Harris and Klebold, the shooters there, were white.

Historically, Latinos and Asians have been the exception.

The Virginia Tech massacre was carried out by Seung-Hui Cho, who was born in South Korea.

"Latinos are almost nowhere to be seen," Cullen told CNN's "New Day." "Asians continue to be heavily overrepresented -- more than 2½ times their size in the population."

It would depend on what you mean by 'more likely'. People with light skin tone are a larger share of the population, and so they will also be a larger share of the perpetrators, but not a larger share as a proportion of their population.

Here is a per-capita chart:

https://archive.org/details/Cmx4pI0UIAEvwZI

Mass Shootings By Race Per Capita

I've come to discover that the Mother Jones compilation may be biased, as it left off Plano, TX, 8 killed. It also has shootings with only 3 fatalities, while mass shootings are generally defined as 4 fatalities (not including shooter). Why didn't they include the Ohio baby party 'mass shooting' with many injured but only 1 fatality?

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    This is a tertiary source (Politics.SE points to Wikipedia points to CNN points to Mother Jones). The answer would be improved by unravelling a few layers to get to the data. – Oddthinking Apr 29 '16 at 23:49
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    Do they even have enough data for Asian-Americans to conclude anything one way or another? They have about 150 mass shootings, I suspect, with Asian-Americans at only 5% of the population. – Obie 2.0 Jul 09 '18 at 08:30
  • I'd expect the numbers for Latinos to be much more solid, and if so, that's intriguing. I wonder what would cause that. – Obie 2.0 Jul 09 '18 at 08:31
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    You should really put your edit on bias closer to the top of the answer rather than burying it away at the bottom, it seems quite significant. – Prometheus Nov 26 '18 at 19:02
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    @Hashim The evidence for bias doesn't really stand up though: Mother Jones states their methodology clearly. Plano is not included because they exclude domestic violence. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/ Whether mass shooting should be 3 or 4 fatalities is debateable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting Not counting a incident with a single fatality is also bias? Seriously? – richardb Feb 16 '19 at 17:03
  • The bar graph is dated 1982-to-2016, so it makes sense that they didn't include the two events from 2017. – Nat Jun 27 '20 at 11:13
  • Actually, looks like they updated the database since then, and the newer version doesn't include the 2017 events, either -- though this is consistent with [their methodology](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map/) which excludes, e.g., events in non-public settings. Hard to verify if their database is truly complete without doing significant research, but the exclusion of those two cases is entirely consistent with their stated methodology. – Nat Jun 27 '20 at 11:38