On July 18th 33 people were killed in a fire intentionally set by a 41 year old suspect with the aid of an accelerant.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49027178
Two questions about media coverage of this fire that killed 33 people:
1) Why is this story newsworthy for gun rights?
Japan is a nation that has an almost total ban on firearms. It shows that people will use other methods besides firearms to kill their fellow man.
Arson has been a method for destroying life and property that predates firearms and once started, difficult to put out. More people die annually from fires than from so-called
mass shootings.
The US Fire Administration has posted data from 2008 to 2017 showing the number of deaths in each year which appears to be around to 3,100 to over 3,600 per year.
https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/fire_death_rates.html
| Year | Number of Fire Deaths | Population | Fire Death Rate (per million population) |
|---|
| 2008 | 3,650 | 304,093,966 | 12.0 |
| 2009 | 3,391 | 306,771,529 | 11.1 |
| 2010 | 3,445 | 309,326,085 | 11.1 |
| 2011 | 3,414 | 311,580,009 | 11.0 |
| 2012 | 3,146 | 313,874,218 | 10.0 |
| 2013 | 3,468 | 316,057,727 | 11.0 |
| 2014 | 3,428 | 318,386,421 | 10.8 |
| 2015 | 3,362 | 320,742,673 | 10.5 |
| 2016 | 3,515 | 323,071,342 | 10.9 |
| 2017 | 3,645 | 325,147,121 | 11.2 |
There is no standard definition for a mass shooting. The FBI definition for a mass murderer is a person who
“kills four or more people in a single incident (not including himself), typically in a single location”
So rather than focusing on the number of so called mass shootings, which can vary significantly depending on the definition, lets focus on mass
murders.
The graph below is from the Rand Corporation and is illustrative of the fact that a person's chances of dying in a fire are about ten times greater than all mass murder scenarios. If we only consider the mass murder scenarios in a public setting (Dayton, El Paso, Gilroy, Parkland) then a persons chances of dying in a fire are almost 100 times greater.
https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/fire_death_rates.html
View attachment 7139907
By now, some of you are saying,
"Okay Longshot, you've shown us ALL of the fire related deaths in the US but most of those are accidental. What about the intentional deaths caused by Arson?"
That's a great question. I had some difficulty looking up the number of deaths caused by arson, and the FBI UCR, surprisingly had some data on the number of intentional fires in the US but nothing on deaths caused by arson.
I was able to find an old paper by the U.S. Fire Administration (2001) which showed about 475 deaths each year caused by arson.
file:///C:/Users/Owner/Downloads/10264.pdf
A fact sheet by the National Fire Protection Association from 2017 shows an average of 440 deaths due to arson.
https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/...-reports/Fact-sheets/IntentionalFactSHeet.pdf
So lets put the number of deaths caused by arson and those caused by mass murder in proper perspective.
The anti-gun Vox website is being continually updated so by the time you look at this web site the date will change. Nevertheless, from the date of the shooting at Sandy Hook October 14, 2012 to the date of this posting 2,492 days have elapsed.
According to the statistics from this anti gun web site there have been 2,459 killed in, what they define as, mass shooting.
Do the math and that is almost one person killed per day in so called mass shootings. Keep in mind that those figures are from an anti-gun organization.
https://www.vox.com/a/mass-shootings-america-sandy-hook-gun-violence
Using the conservative estimate of arson related deaths from the National Fire Protection Association (440 per year) that is an average of 1.2 deaths per day caused by someone intentionally setting a fire.
Using the FBI definition of mass murder I come up with an average (see the graph above) of about 100 people killed each year. You may see something different but that's my estimate. So that is about .274 deaths per day due to mass murder. Let's round that up to .3 deaths per day.
The conclusion from this data couldn't be anymore salient; your chances of dying at the hands of an arsonist are three times more likely than by a mass murderer in the United States.
Any death, whether intentional or by accident is tragic but the SJWs screaming at the top of their lungs for the government to do something about mass shootings ought to be yelling with equal fervor to stop arson.
2) Why didn't the western media cover this tragedy with a fervor equal to mass shootings?
This question is quite simple to answer. It's short, sweet and empirically based.
The MSM doesn't care. Arson doesn't fit their narrative. That's why the western media outlets didn't focus on the mass murder in Kyoto.
They never will. That is very sad. I could write more but interested in what everyone else has to say.
www.atlasobscura.com
