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Why does the United States have the highest rate of mass shootings in the entire world?Because of a man named Adam Lankford. No, really.In 2015 US President Barrack Obama claimed in numerous statements the US was responsible for 30% of the world’s mass shootings, an astronomically high share compared to any other nation. This was based on a study by Lankford,In a paper that had not yet been published, Lankford conducted a statistical analysis of the total number of public mass shooters per country from 1966 to 2012 in 171 countries and controlled for the national population size. He said his data showed the United States had significantly more mass shooters, with 90 between 1966 and 2012, compared with 202 in the rest of the world.Seems pretty straightforward, but that didn’t seem right to researcher John Lott,Lott said that he found 1,491 mass public shootings worldwide in a shorter time period — between 1998 and 2012 — and that fewer than 3 percent were in the United States. Compared to Lankford’s 31 percent of all shooters, Lott calculated that the United States produced fewer than 1.43 percent of the mass public shooters. (He counted a total of 43 shooters in the United States between 1998 and 2012.) Overseas, "We find at least fifteen times more mass public shooters than Lankford in less than a third the number of years," he wrote.When asked for his data sets to reconcile such a large difference in data Lankford refused,At the time, he declined to provide The Fact Checker with the underlying data on the worldwide shootings he had collected. Once he published the study, in 2016, he still declined to release the data. He would only say it was based on a report from the New York City police department and an FBI report, as well as a survey of news reports overseas.Not being able to review the data makes it impossible to see what exactly is going on. In academic circles that is as good as the study never existing at all, however, the claims made were picked up by the media and even the President of the United States. Lott’s work, on the other hand, has received much less attention, despite being completely transparent with his data and methods.What do academics say about Lott’s work on this topic,Professor Carl Moody, College of William & Mary offered the following: “This is an important paper. The assertion that the US is responsible for 31 percent of worldwide mass shooters is patently absurd.So how far off is that 30% claim by Obama and Lankford,The US is, according to the GTD. responsible for less than one percent of all mass shootings (0.69 percent) since 1970.Not even close.Postscript: 2.5k Upvotes and still this answer is behind another with 69 Upvotes. Seems this gained quite a bit of attention to have about 5,000 people vote on it, which seems pretty odd to me because it’s just a summary of a few articles.The most common comment on this answer has to do with the personal integrity of John Lott, usually referencing events from over 20 years ago. Fun fact; I read lots of research and only look at the names of the researchers after I’ve finished reading their actual work, if at all. It is justified to argue about the data and the conclusions, not the one that researched the data and stated the conclusions. To dismiss research on the basis of the researcher’s personal life or misdeeds leaves us with nothing to read. There are plenty of researchers that invalidate their work with shoddy methodology, extreme data manipulation, and leaps of faith in their conclusions, yet I read their new work and judge it on the merits of the work, not their past work. The purpose of all this is not to state the answer and move on to the next problem but to constantly think about these problems and experience different perspectives in order to get a more complete and complex understanding of the topic. Falling into simple tribalism revolving around someone’s political affiliation, stance on the topic, race, education, or any other factors doesn’t get us anywhere. This is the time for honest debate, as all sides have called for, if you can’t debate based on the merit of the data and must employ personal attacks you shouldn’t be (and aren’t actually) debating. This answer isn’t balanced, it presents one side only (from three different entities that are, left, right, and apolitical) because it is a counter to a completely unbalanced and clearly fraudulent claim. If you want to get balanced responses make balanced claims.If you liked this answer check out another one of my answers about the overall situation in the US:When are we going to say, "Enough with guns already"?And a similar article: Everybody’s Lying About the Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide

Before I proceed, I need to offer some context and own my biases. When I first saw the trailer for Mary Poppins Returns, here is what I posted on Facebook:<Me discussing politics & government> Society needs to adapt, change, and progress. We can’t stay moored to cultural artifacts from the 1950s & 60s.<Trailer for Mary Poppins sequel debuts> WE MUST BE VERY CAUTIOUS WITH CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS THAT HAVE STOOD THE TEST OF TIME!!!You know how some people get hyper-protective of Star Wars? Yeah… I can get that way about Mary Poppins. Anyone who has met me in person can easily imagine about how me watching Dick van Dyke’s Bert lead the chimney sweeps in Step in Time as young child might have impacted the overall course of my life.Okay, to cut to the chase: I liked it just fine. It was visually fun and, with some time to adjust to the fact that it’s not a Sherman Brothers score, the songs are growing on me (especially The Cover is not the Book). Rob Marshall — who is also a Carnegie Mellon School of Drama alum and therefore someone I am predisposed to trust with this particular project if I’m to trust any director with my cherished childhood memories — and the creative team did a satisfactory job.<pause>…As established, however, I cherish (revere?) the original movie so of course I have some critiques.Scene for scene, it’s almost the exact same structure.Consider the following:The movie opens on a working class commoner who escorts the audience to #17 Cherry Tree Lane.We discover the Banks Family in a state of crisis.A destroyed and discarded piece of paper flies into the sky.Mary Poppins arrives, has a brief one-sided “negotiation,” and floats up the bannister to immediately start caring for the children in the family.There is a musical number themed around cleaning up.Mary Poppins magically transports the children and the working class commoner we met earlier into an illustration, where Mary Poppins winds up the honored guest & celebrity at a public spectacle and there is a chase scene.Back in the nursery, Mary Poppins sings a soothing song to help the disquieted children calm down.The children and the commoner join Mary Poppins to visit a very peculiar relative of Mary’s and spend some time around that relative’s ceiling.The children are taken to the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank where they cause a commotion and upset the men in charge.After leaving the bank, the children get lost… but conveniently run into the commoner. There is a large, rousing dance number with the commoner and his fellow humble (but exuberant) friends.Mr. Banks (the children’s father), who has lost sight of what’s important, comes to reconsider what matters in life as an earlier song is reprised.There is climactic confrontation at the bank at a clearly specified time, where Mr. Banks boldly asserts himself to his employer.The surprise appearance of Mr. Dawes, Jr. resolves the family’s financial uncertainty.The movie concludes with an uplifting musical number in the park connected to a flying object that one typically keeps holds on to with a string.There were clearly some story differences like the introduction of the Disney-obligatory dead parent and a more consciously & deliberately malicious antagonist in the form of Colin Firth’s William Wilkins, but those are functionally changes to exposition and character. The plot structure that carries the action is nearly identical. There’s homage… and then there’s “this formula worked before so follow it precisely.”For my part, I would’ve liked to see the Banks Family (or even a wholly different family) find a somewhat different path to the resolution of their crisis. Imagine an alternate approach where instead of introducing the character of Jack, the working class commoner character had turned out to be none other than Michael Banks while the family the film focused on was a new family in need of help.Emily Blunt’s Mary Poppins was just a little too “knowing” and “in control” throughout the movie.Emily Blunt isn’t Julie Andrews and I certainly wouldn’t expect her to approach the character in precisely the same way…HOWEVER…One of the things that makes Julie Andrews’ Mary Poppins practically perfect in every way is her absolute commitment to each moment at hand without giving up a larger agenda (at least until the very end when she finally departs). She arrives at the Banks home because the children wrote an advertisement and she leaves when the wind changes. With regard to the plot of the original Mary Poppins, she spends more of the movie functioning less as a character pursuing a set of objectives and more as a full-blown force of nature that the movie’s actual protagonist, George Banks, has to wrangle with. (“…Then came this person, with chaos in her wake.”) The key foil to George Banks the banker — who serves as a contrasting reflection at the moment of anagnorisis — isn’t Mary Poppins. It’s Bert the chimney sweep. Whether she’s in the magical world of the children or the “well-ordered” world of the adults, Mary Poppins operates with firmness and conviction. It isn’t until the very end of the movie when she’s conversing with her parrot that she smiles wistfully and affirms that the family situation is now “just as it should be.”Emily Blunt and Rob Marshall’s camera & editing choices present Mary Poppins as sly and knowing throughout the movie. She makes clearly calculated choices like hiding Michael’s briefcase to have an excuse to go to the bank and then turning her back on the children at the bank while watching their reflection in the brass panels. She directly intervenes in the resetting of Big Ben five minutes back… which is a pretty key act in the central plot-line. That all begs the question which the original movie never had cause to consider: when & why does Mary Poppins choose to use her powers and when & why does she refrain? In the first movie, she challenges the children on whether they actually experienced what they experienced (“A respectable person like me in a horse race? How dare you suggest such a thing”), but she never calls upon the children to actively conceal some adventure they had like when she discretely signals a “shhh” to Georgie by putting her forefinger over her lips in Mary Poppins Returns.I’d say this contrast was most brought to the fore in the bathtub number “Can You Imagine That?” While it’s an upbeat and energetic song, it’s somewhat sarcastic and condescending. Its structural parallel in the original movie is “A Spoonful of Sugar” — which is both fantastical and sincere.Speaking of Mary Poppins having clear designs, why is she messing around with Jane’s love life?Jane Banks is an, at best, peripheral character in the movie who seems to only be in the movie because Mary Poppins Returns’ strict parallelism to the original demands a generally cheerful activist to fill the slot occupied by Glynis Johns’ suffragette/high society wife & mother Winnifred Banks and because Jane, Michael’s older sister, was central to the first movie. Never once out of Jane’s own mouth do we hear her say… well… much of anything. (Seriously? You all parallel everything else but skip “Sister Suffragette”? That’s a miss.) Therefore we certainly don’t hear her express any desire for her life to have taken a different course involving marriage and children. Ellen relayed at one point says that Jane said “that ship had sailed,” but there was no indication that Jane had any personal desire to be on that ship or was remotely wistful about choices she’d made. So, then, why does Mary Poppins take it upon herself to try to set her up with Jack, who’d apparently had a crush on her since childhood? While set in England of the 1930’s, Mary Poppins Returns is made and in and for the year 2018. The movie is not a period piece, so it is effectively staking out an argument that an adult woman in her 30s can’t possibly be content and “complete” unless she’s paired off with a romantic partner.Since Mary Poppins herself is less of a force of nature and more of a calculating actor advancing a specific agenda in this movie, I can’t help but notice that there isn’t a ring on her finger or a Mr. Poppins floating about. She should mind her own business on this front! It seems like David Magee, Rob Marshall, and John DeLuca didn’t really know what to do to make Jane and Jack more than peripheral… so they decided to try to pair them off.If the movie had been a bit more daring, it could’ve made Jane — rather than Michael — the central character and told the story of widowed woman with three children struggling to feed and shelter them during the Great Depression. Michael could’ve long-ago forsaken his familial class status and become the “commoner” character, unable to provide much financial help… or he could’ve followed his father into banking, only to have become estranged from his sister in a fight over the title to #17 Cherry Tree Lane. A greedy and embittered Michael would’ve made for a better-justified antagonist than William Wilkins, no matter how much skill that Colin Firth brings to an effectively stock mustache-twirling banker. (Momentary tangent: Does William Wilkins have some personal grudge against the family of George Banks? Why does he want their specific house so badly?) Or they could’ve just had Michael die in the 1918 flu pandemic.…but they made the choices they made and it’s Michael Banks’ journey that we’re primarily following, so let’s get back to that.Let’s talk about Michael’s childhood twopence.“BOY! GEE! WOW! IT’S A DANG GOOD THING THAT MICHAEL’S FATHER GAVE MICHAEL’S TWOPENCE TO MISTER DAWES, SR. AT THE END OF THE ORIGINAL MOVIE (RATHER THAN DOING SOMETHING SILLY LIKE FEEDING BIRDS OR BUYING PAPER & STRING TO FIX A KITE) SO THAT MISTER DAWES, JR. COULD SHOW UP AT THE END OF MARY POPPINS RETURNS TO REVEAL THAT MICHAEL HAD A SECRET FORTUNE BEYOND HIS SHARES IN THE BANK THAT HE COULD USE TO SAVE HIS HOUSE!”Okay… first and foremost, what on Earth did Mr. Dawes, Jr. invest twopence into in/around 1910 that yielded enough annual returns to save the day in 1935? For those who don’t speak British currency: during the period of the film, it was 240 pence to the pound.) Looking at historical data on the FTSE All Shares index, the close on December 31, 1910 was 33.81 and the close on December 31, 1934 was 31.75. Was he generating 75%+ returns per year? With any appreciation of the history of those particular 25 years, the inescapable conclusion is that Dawes built a small fortune out of Michael’s twopence through, at the very least, massive war profiteering.Kind of kills the joy a bit, doesn’t it? Since I previously accepted that it wasn’t a period piece, I’ll set that aside and not bind the movie to actual world history. That still leaves several issues related to the story.First: while I was certainly pleased to see Dick van Dyke on the big screen, Mr. Dawes, Jr.’s entrance was an annoyingly tidy deus ex machina. Dawes entered at the precise moment — having, of course, been summoned by Mary Poppins (see prior commentary) — to elevate the protagonist & his family and punish the antagonist. Michael and the children weren’t about to find themselves in deprivation; they had a plan to move in with Jane. They had already affirmed the importance of family and were ready to walk away from the house which they’d already invested the emotional labor of vacating. Discovering not only that Mr. Dawes, Jr. would honor the stock certificate but he had also had built up a separate pile of money in the name of Michael and the kids was a bit much. At least in the original movie, when Mr. Dawes, Jr. showed up in the park and made George Banks a partner, his doing so was born out of character choices and resulting actions from the night before. Seeing his father joyful changed Mr. Dawes, Jr.’s heart. Convenient? Yes, but it was still a product of the story. In Mary Poppins Returns, even though he was previously mentioned, Mr. Dawes, Jr. effectively entered out of nowhere.That leads to a bigger thematic issue with Michael’s twopence: the entire third act of the original movie revolves around that tiny bit of money. There was effectively a duel of songs between the bank partners singing of wealth-building, social status, and financial conquest in Fidelity Fiduciary Bank and Mary Poppins singing of charity, kindness, and caring in Feed the Birds. By trying to cutely tie the plots together, the Mary Poppins Returns team has either deliberately or inadvertently weighed in on that conflict on the side of the bank partners’ pre-wooden-leg-named-Smith-joke argument about the intrinsically inconsequential sum of twopence. While there could certainly be some exploration of certain adult responsibilities (like saving and financial planning) being necessary while not being as important or valuable as investing time with your family, invoking that twopence to create a hidden fortune was a poor way to go about it.A few other things that bothered me:Mary Poppins’ balking about discussion of her age and weight. I understand that the creative team felt like they needed to address Mary Poppins having not aged a day in 25 years and I get that Mary Poppins is certainly conscious of good manners, but the way they approached that presented her as vain rather than practically perfect in every way. As I’ve repeatedly affirmed, this is still a movie made for audience in 2018 and not a period piece.The comment between Angela Lansbury’s Balloon Woman (An elder relative of Eglantine Price, perhaps???) and Mary Poppins about how “the adults never remember” at the end of the film. It is quite clear that numerous adults throughout the movie know exactly what sort of magic is possible, but most of those adults who seem to have no problem remembering — folks like Jack and Ellen and the lamplighters — happen to be lower class. I know that the movie was trying to make a point about how easy it is for adults to lose sight of the simple joys of childhood rather than being dismissive to people who don’t come from wealthy families and have secret investment accounts… but that was a bit sloppy.I would’ve liked a hint at the possibility of redemption for William Wilkins rather than simply getting rejected by the balloon he chose. In the original film, seeing Mr. Dawes, Jr. and the bank directors in the park flying kites with everyone else offered hope for even the film’s core antagonists, whereas Wilkins was basically written off so we could see the bad guy suffer a bit more. I personally like the proposition that we can all become better people.If all of this leaves you with the impression that I think Mary Poppins Returns isn’t worth seeing, I assure you that’s not the case. I cared enough about the movie to invest the time to thoughtfully critique it. It’s a fun family outing that has supercalifragilisticexpialidocious shoes to fill.

This question reminds me of a blog post by (Quora user and n-Category Café host) John Baez, titled "Can Five-Year-Olds Compute Coproducts?", in which he reported on an article from PLOS Computational Biology,Steven Phillips, William H. Wilson and Graeme S. Halford (2009), What Do Transitive Inference and Class Inclusion Have in Common? Categorical (Co)Products and Cognitive Development. PLoS Comput Biol 5(12)Let me quote (John Baez quoting) the article:Children acquire various reasoning skills over remarkably similar periods of development. Transitive Inference and Class Inclusion are two behaviours among a suite of inferential abilities that have strikingly similar developmental profiles—all are acquired around the age of five years. For example, older children can infer that if John is taller than Mary, and Mary is taller than Sue, then John is taller than Sue. This form of reasoning is called Transitive Inference. Older children also understand that a grocery store will contain more fruit than apples. That is, the number of items belonging to the superclass is greater than the number of items in any one of its subclasses. This form of reasoning is called Class Inclusion. These two types of inference appear to have little in common. Transitive Inference typically involves physical relationships between objects, while Class Inclusion involves abstract relative sizes of object classes. Nonetheless, explicit tests of these and other inferences for a range of age groups revealed that success was attained from about the median age of five years.Since Piaget, decades of research have revealed important clues regarding the development of inference, yet little is known about the reasons underlying these correspondences. A common theme in two recent proposals is the computing of relational information. In regard to Relational Complexity theory, the correspondence between commonly acquired cognitive behaviours is based on the maximum arity of relations that must be processed (e.g., tasks acquired after age five involve ternary relations, i.e., relations between three items). In regard to Cognitive Complexity and Control theory, the correspondence is based on the common depth of relation hierarchies. Although a relational approach to cognitive behaviour has a formal basis in relational algebra, certain assumptions must be made about the units of analysis. For tasks as diverse in procedure and content as Transitive Inference and Class Inclusion, it is difficult to see how the analysis of one task leads naturally to the other. For Relational Complexity theory, Transitive Inference is considered to involve the integration of two binary relations between task elements into an ordered triple, or ternary relation; whereas Class Inclusion is regarded as the integration of three binary relations between three sets of elements (one complement and two containments) into a ternary relation. For Cognitive Complexity and Control theory, Transitive Inference involves relations over items; whereas Class Inclusion involves relations over sets of items.This theoretical difficulty is symptomatic of the general problem in cognitive science where the basic components of cognition are unknown. In the absence of such detailed knowledge, cognitive modelers have been forced to assume a particular representational format (e.g., symbolic, or subsymbolic). This approach, however, does not lend itself to the current problem, because the elements of Transitive Inference and Class Inclusion tasks (i.e., objects and classes of objects) do not share a common basis. Understandably, then, these sorts of behaviours have tended to be studied in detailed isolation, narrowing the scope for identifying general principles.Category theory was born out of a desire to establish formal commonalities between various mathematical structures, and has since been applied to the analysis of computational structures in computer science. The seminal insight was a shift from objects as the primary focus of analysis to their transformations. Contrast, for instance, sets defined in terms of (the properties of) the objects they contain—Set Theory—against sets defined in terms of the morphisms that map to or from them—Category Theory. This insight motivates our categorical approach to the analysis of inference, and our way around the current impasse. In cognitive science, several authors have used category theory for a conceptual analysis of space and time, though we know of only one other application that has modeled empirical data. Since our application of category theory to cognitive behaviour is novel, we first introduce the basic category theory constructs needed for our subsequent analysis of Transitive Inference, Class Inclusion, and other paradigms. The analysis begins with a brief introduction of the sort of data our approach is intended to explain, which primarily concerns contrasts between younger and older children relative to age five, and correlations across paradigms. Finally, we extend our categorical approach to more complex levels of inference. Our main point is that, despite the apparent lack of resemblance, all these tasks are formally connected via the categorical (co)product, to be defined below. The significance of this result is that it opens the door to an entirely new (empirical) approach to identifying general principles, particularly in regard to the development of inferential abilities, that are less likely to be revealed by standard modeling methods.