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why was my edit incorrect? edit

On the article for Mass shootings in the United States you reverted my edit and your reason was: change to sourced statement; change does not appear to be supported by the source.

Would you be able to please explain how my edit was incorrect? The source references 49.18% white men commit public mass shootings. 18.03% more than the second highest demographic. 63.157.252.62 (talk) 02:42, 5 January 2022 (UTC)Reply


Hi, thanks for reaching out! When reviewing the source attached to the statement I took note of the phrase "Public mass killers are a heterogeneous group and are frequently delineated into several subtypes. Public murderers are often stereotyped as middle-aged white men..."[1]. So on a cursory glance at the source, what you said ("a majority of the time tend to be committed by White, middle-aged men.") doesn't really seem to line up. Now, looking at the table I see that 49.18% is pretty close to half, but that's not a majority and really even if it were 51% I'd really be wary about calling that a majority; while it's technically true, it doesn't really represent a "majority" as most people would think about the term. It just really doesn't seem to be a good interpretation of the source material. Also, just because something is the biggest category out of multiple doesn't automatically make it the "majority". In this case, I would argue that since the highest category is less than 50%, there simply isn't a majority category at all.
The original text also said that

"Public mass shootings of persons unrelated to the shooter, and for a reason not connected with a previous crime (the rarest but most publicized) are committed by men whose racial distribution closely matches that of the nation as a whole".

The provided source mentions that the "white male" category does not seem to be disproportionate:

"Despite the widespread perception that mass shooters are overwhelmingly white males, researchers have found that white men are not overrepresented among mass shooters. In other words, white men are no more likely than other male demographic to engage in a mass shooting."[1]

But with that said, I guess I haven't found a really clear statement about that in the source linked. I did however find something to back it up a little in another document that it links to, saying that "but that figure, too, wasn’t that far off from U.S. demographics"[2], so I'll go ahead and add it as a reference. I hope that explains my reasoning a little bit, and of course feel free to make your own changes as well.

Thegreatgrabber (talk) contribs 03:51, 5 January 2022 (UTC)Reply

References

  1. ^ a b "Who Are Mass Shooters? Mass Shooter Demographics".
  2. ^ Engber, Daniel. "What the white mass-shooter myth gets right and wrong about killers' demographics". Slate. The Slate Group. Retrieved 5 January 2022.

ArbCom 2022 Elections voter message edit

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