EDITORIAL: President’s mass shooting narrative belies facts

While laying out his new executive order on guns on Jan. 7, President Barack Obama once again uttered one of his favorite talking points regarding mass shootings in America.

"We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency," he said. "It doesn't happen in other advanced countries. It's not even close. And as I've said before, somehow we've become numb to it and we start thinking that this is normal."

President Obama's anger is understandable. Even one mass shooting is one too many, and, yes, it's vital that we as a nation find ways to stop the killing. But if the president is going to roll out a new executive order on guns, it would be nice if he got his facts straight — or stopped misrepresenting them — before doing so.

Simply put, the president is wrong when he says (again and again) that mass shootings "just don't happen" in other advanced countries like they do in the United States. According to a study by the Crime Research Prevention Center, between January 2009 and December of last year — spanning exactly President Obama's entire time in office — there were 11 European countries with a higher frequency of mass public shootings than the United States, and 10 European countries with a higher rate of mass shooting-related deaths.

For example, France — a country with roughly one-fifth the population of the United States — suffered more casualties (murders and injuries) from mass public shootings in 2015 alone than were seen here during President Obama's time in the White House. And while the president must be aware of such numbers, that didn't stop him from promoting America's supposed mass shooting monopoly during a speech just a couple of weeks after ISIS killed 130 people in France in November. Or during an interview that aired on CBS on Dec. 2. Or during his aforementioned executive order announcement earlier this month.

Not only is the United States actually becoming safer compared with Europe, in terms of both of frequency of mass public shootings and number of mass shooting-related fatalities, but President Obama's repeated errant claims and continued grandstanding on gun control executive actions are doing nothing to prevent the mass shootings that we do see here.

Guns aren't the issue; radical terrorists hellbent on destruction and criminals undeterred by any law or executive action are a huge part of the problem, as are our woefully underwhelming efforts to identify and treat mentally unstable people before they carry out violent acts.

If we work to solve those issues, we may actually make some headway on the very rare, but very well-publicized, occurrences of mass shootings in the U.S.