In the days following the Charleston, S.C., massacre that left nine African-Americans dead at the hands of a seemingly racist gunman, President Barack Obama repeatedly claimed that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries."
Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking website PolitiFact rates that statement as "Mostly False."
Speaking at a White House press conference just hours after the attack occurred, Obama said, "Now is the time for mourning and for healing. But let's be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it."
It's not the first time the president has made such claims - In 2014, Obama said, "We are the only developed county on Earth where this happens," according to CNS News - but it's the first time PolitiFact has called him out for it.
The independent fact checkers first verified the veracity of the first portion of Obama's claim, that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries," and concluded that this part is easily proved incorrect.
PolitiFact wrote:
"Over the decade and a half studied, the researchers found 23 incidents of mass shootings in the other 10 countries, resulting in 200 dead and 231 wounded. In the United States over the same period, there were 133 incidents that left 487 dead and 505 wounded.
Here are a just a few examples of mass shootings in other countries:
- On July 22, 2011, a total of 80 people were killed in Norway when Anders Behring Breivik, a political extremist, bombed a government building in Oslo and then went on a shooting rampage on the island of Utoya, just outside the city.
- On March 11, 2009, in Winnenden, Germany, a teenage gunman killed 15 people. The majority of the victims were children and teachers killed when the shooter opened fire in three classrooms in a local secondary school. The gunman shot two other people before killing himself after being cornered by the local police.
- On Sept. 23, 2008, in Kuahajoki, Finland, a gunman shot 10 people to death after opening fire on a classroom in the Kuahajoki School of Hospitality. After killing the students, the shooter burned the victims' bodies.
In sum, then, Obama is wrong to say that 'this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.' Clearly it does happen elsewhere, and not in trivial numbers. Seven of the countries saw double-digit numbers of people killed in mass shootings during that period."
Next up, PolitiFact took to the second part of Obama's claim: that mass shootings don't "happen in other places with this kind of frequency," which the group said "isn't entirely off-base."
Comparing mass shooting incidents across countries, the group calculated the number of victims per capita, adjusted for the nation's total population size.
PolitiFact continues:
"Calculating it this way shows the United States in the upper half of the list of 11 countries, ranking higher than Australia, Canada, China, England, France, Germany and Mexico.
Still, the U.S. doesn't rank No. 1. At 0.15 mass shooting fatalities per 100,000 people, the U.S. had a lower rate than Norway (1.3 per 100,000), Finland (0.34 per 100,000) and Switzerland (1.7 per 100,000).
We'll note that all of these countries had one or two particularly big attacks and have relatively small populations, which have pushed up their per-capita rates. In Norway, that single attack in 2011 left 67 dead by gunfire (plus additional bomb casualties). Finland had two attacks, one that killed eight and one that killed 10. And Switzerland had one incident that killed 14.
Still, while the United States did rank in the top one-third of the list, the fact that three other countries exceeded the United States using this method of comparison does weaken Obama's claim that 'it doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency.' In at least three countries, the data shows, it does."
Being that three other countries exceeded the United States in terms of frequency of attacks, PolitiFact said Obama's second claim simply didn't hold up either. "In at least three countries, the data shows, it does," they said.
The group concluded: "The data shows that it clearly happens in other countries, and in at least three of them, there's evidence that the rate of killings in mass-shooting events occurred at a higher per-capita rate than in the United States between 2000 and 2014. The only partial support for Obama's claim is that the per-capita gun-incident fatality rate in the United States does rank in the top one-third of the list of 11 countries studied. On balance, we rate the claim Mostly False."
