"...But while Peterson might be wrong about what causes mass shootings, Manne is certainly mistaken about who commits them.By blaming this angst, she writes, Peterson "takes on a huge burden of explaining why white women, people of color, nonbinary folks, and so on, almost never act on our existential angst and despair in this way. Because, as you know, the vast majority of school shooters have been white men."
Yes, most mass killers are white—but white people represent three-quarters of the U.S. population.
If anything, mass killers are disproportionately non-white.
According to Slate's Daniel Engber, who parsed Mother Jones's mass shooting database earlier this year, about 56 percent of mass shooters are white:
...Perpetrators that Mother Jones classifies as Asian make up 7.4 percent of the data set, versus an estimated 5.7 percent of the population, while those MoJo identifies as black represent 17.0 percent of the mass shooters in the database versus an estimated 13.3 percent of the population.
According to this data set, then, Asians and black Americans are overrepresented among mass shooters by about the same proportion (a bit more than one-fourth) that whites are underrepresented.
That database covers mass shootings in general (and is flawed in that it probably undercounts mass shootings that happened further back in time). It might be more accurate to say that Columbine-style mass shootings specifically committed in schools are disproportionately perpetrated by white people, but there have only been 8 of those kinds of attacks—shootings in which at least four people were shot to death in a school—since 1996.
Schools are actually so safe that it's pretty useless to make statistically sound racial generalizations about the kinds of mass murders committed there..."
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