Suppose you are the Nefarious Large Organization (NLO) and you want to kill lots of random Americans but you do not want your fingerprints on the trigger weapons.

How might you go about doing this? Having a long time frame helps. You're going to need a large political arm that can help with loosening laws to create the conditions you need. You'll need to grow your NLO organization.

A two prong approach can work wonders. You need to get large numbers of weapons into the hands of lots and lots of people.

First, which weapons? Knives don't kill many people, are very personal, and are hard to work with. You might get hurt trying to use a knife, especially if someone fights back. Bombs are difficult to make and have a habit of blowing up their amateur makers as much as blowing up the intended targets. Plus they need to be hidden. There is a military complex that makes bombs, and there is a cottage industry in bomb making in parts of the third world, but in the first world, bombs perhaps aren't optimal. You would need better bomb training and if your NLO started marketing bomb making courses, people might catch on when bombs with your designs started killing lots of people. Guns would be better, as other companies make them. Your NLO doesn't need to make guns, just advocate for their use and acquisition. Although guns take some skill, that skill is easily acquired. Or you can shoot into large crowds where it is hard to miss. But Saturday night specials and revolvers have a limited number of bullets. Having guns with lots of bullets that shoot quickly in the hands of many people is paramount for achieving your goal of killing lots of Americans. Thus the need for automatic firearms.

This is where your NLO political operation becomes paramount. It takes a long time frame and plenty of cash to get politicians to set the stage where you can get these automatic firearms into the hands of lots of people. This may take you decades. Advertising can induce a cachet to owning automatic firearms and after the population of owners gets large enough, network effects will work to spread their availability and ownership.

If you can get enough weapons into enough hands, the 'which people' part will solve itself as there are always some people willing to work with you in your goal of wanting to kill lots of Americans without your fingerprints on the weapons. You won't even need to communicate directly with those people.

Humans do not classify neatly into 'good people' or 'bad people'. We're all good some of the time and we're all bad at least occasionally. The fractions of good/bad vary from person to person and over time within a person. Toss in a rare event (what people call 'bad luck' or 'an accident') and something terrible can happen. You speed, you drink and drive, you walk atop a wall, you clamber up a steep cliff. People can be immature, then they grow up, get a job, get married and settle down. People can be fine, then get depressed or desperate. Your spouse or mother dies and you have no one caring for you, keeping you safe and on an even keel, keeping those mental demons quiet. You suddenly are isolated, alone. You have difficulty in school, get teased a lot.

It's a fiction that we just have to keep the guns out of the hands of the 'bad people'. Truth is that most of our killers are 'good people', legally speaking, right up until they actually start killing people. Medically, it's virtually impossible to distinguish people at risk of doing bad things some time in the future and those who are not. Certainly before they bought or inherited that first gun, before their friend or neighbor or local advertising circular introduced them to that gun, they were fine, legally speaking. They buy that first gun, they still classify as 'good people'. Before something bad happened to them, before they lost their job, before their last parent died, before they were picked on, before they became depressed or suicidal, people were 'good people'.

You the NLO need to get those guns into the hands of millions of people. Some of those people are going to have problems. They become sick. They may get depressed. They get in a car accident. Socially they are isolated, or they become isolated. They don't fit in. They get teased. They feel like they are teased, even if they are not. Mild paranoia may set in. They think strangers and foreigners are going to take what is rightfully theirs. They may not have been raised with a full set of social skills to handle modern society. These people aren't all that common, they're not the majority. Most of us humans are doing fine, are decent people and aren't teased so badly that we think about becoming killers or drug addicts. That's why you need millions of gun owners. Not all of those millions of gun owners are going to have good sense. They may give or sell their guns to some troubled soul. They may encourage some troubled soul to buy guns as a way to self-worth. They themselves may grow to have psychological problems themselves even though they've been fine for decades. Take millions of people, and some of them are just going to be 'off'.

You make things easy, those bad things you want to have happen will happen more often. Make it easy to commit suicide, more people will commit suicide. Make it easier to commit mass murder, more people will commit mass murder. We are not talking about making the average person commit suicide or mass murder. Just those in the extremes. Just loosen the laws enough so that one person in a million has the ability to shoot someone else or to shoot themselves.

Similarly, reduce health care, screw up schools, reduce social services, make lives more miserable, increase access to drugs, do what you can to cause more difficulties for more people. This will provide a lush environment to grow people with the potential to have further problems.

Maybe these troubled individuals are only one in a million. This is the problem and the issue of rare events. This is where you, the NLO can hide behind the problem of rare events. How could we foresee some random, rare event occurring? Who us? How could we have figured out that lone individual in Las Vegas or Parkland or Orlando or Sandy Hook might be that one individual who feels so aggrieved that we wish we could have seen them coming? Gee, not my fault you say.

If an event is one in a million, then you need millions of attempts to get a 'success'. If you're the NLO, you need millions of gun owners, so that your guns end up in the hands of that one person who decides that killing a lot of others is the solution to their problems. Low probability events happen when you have lots of chances. Someone always wins the lottery. Your NLO political arm has been working tirelessly for years. Loosening laws, fighting hard, fighting dirty, making glib arguments, buying off amenable politicians. You can tolerate rare events, because you've gotten your guns into the hands of millions of people. You've got millions of chances to hit the jackpot.

You make things easy, those bad things you want to have happen will happen more often. Make it easy to commit suicide, more people will commit suicide. Make it easier to commit mass murder, more people will commit mass murder. We are not talking about making the average person commit suicide or mass murder. Just those in the extremes. Loosen the laws enough so that one person in a million has the ability to shoot someone or to shoot themselves. Eliminate health care, screw up schools, reduce social services, make lives more miserable, do what you can to cause more difficulties for more people. This will provide a warm environment to grow people with the potential to have further problems. You don't need everyone to want to do your bidding, you just need one person. One person in a million.

Modeling is important and useful. Having killers getting lots of press attention in the popular media is very helpful to your NLO plan. More and more of your automatic rifle owners see that killing lots of people is a really neat way to get some attention. The media is on your side, NLO, because the media will spread around the how-to and the what-to and the fame of these killers.

And when you've done your job right, your NLO fingerprints aren't on the trigger. When the killing is over, there is no obvious link between killers. But you've achieved your purpose. Setting many many small probability events in motion, incubating, waiting to see who cracks next, who decides to shoot next.

As the smoke settles, as survivors decide whether to tear down or rebuild the building, as survivors make memorials and attend funerals, your spokespeople say: don't politicize this, don't make decisions in the heat of the moment, don't do something you'll regret later. Your political arm materials just write themselves, don't they?

Sadly the memorials need to be written too. She wanted to be a scientist. He was everyone's friend. They just wanted to watch a good movie. She was an inspiring teacher. He was a great football coach. He was here on vacation. She was in 1st grade. I don't suppose, NLO, that you'd like to contribute to writing the memorials for the people killed today? How about the people killed yesterday? Your machinations are working NLO, congratulations. Maybe you'll work on the future memorials for those killed tomorrow? We appreciate your assistance.

Intro. A good friend has a habit of re-posting on facebook annoying and silly claims about guns. No, I don't want to de-friend him. Mostly I ban the source of the claims but he finds new sources of material. When I attempt to verify some claims, the claims are easily refuted by a quick google search and the first link to Wikipedia.

The most specious of gun-related claims is the 'guns don't kill people, people kill people'. If you want to play it that way, fine. Cars don't drive people, people drive people! Scissors don't cut paper, people cut paper! Knives don't chop vegetables, people chop vegetables! A gun is a tool, as are cars, scissors and knives. I use my car most days to transport me around town, I use scissors perhaps weekly to open mail or cut sheets of paper to needed size; I use knives for daily preparation and consumption of food. Cars, scissors and knives are tools that occasionally get used to kill people. Still, soccer moms/dads and taxi drivers don't kill many folks intentionally with their cars, second graders use scissors for art projects without managing to kill anyone, and chefs and cooks and food-eaters of all kinds use knives without stopping someone's beating heart. 

Data. Being a statistician, what I did do is get data from Wikipedia on numbers of murders and population broken out by state. Wikipedia got its data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics. The FBI for 2010 seemed to be missing data from Florida, but Florida publishes the data for us, and the Florida and FBI sources match the data in the Wikipedia article. That particular Wikipedia article also gave 2010 state population. I subtracted gun murders from total murders to give non-gun murders by state and calculated gun and non-gun murder rates.

Results. The first figure plots numbers of murders (gun and non-gun separately) in a state against state population on a log-log plot with lowess curves (iter=0) for both murder types. Gun murder counts are generally greater than murder counts using all other tools combined. For most of the state population range, the lowess curves are linear and parallel, suggesting that the number of murders of either type goes up as a power of the population. Fitting a simple GLM suggests the power is about 1.1 for both gun and non-gun murders, only slightly larger than 1. 

Only for the smallest population states do the two lowess curves intersect. Checking the data, eight, mostly northerly, mostly smaller states have non-gun murder counts higher than their gun-murder counts; these are Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and West Virginia. The total number of murders with all tools in those 8 states was 262 with 34 more non-gun murders than gun murders.  In contrast, there were 13540 murders in the other 42 states. 

We can also look at gun and non-gun murder rates by state as well; these are given in the second figure. Non-gun murder rates barely increase with population size, while gun murder rates do increase with population size, until somewhere just after 5 million people when the rate of growth tapers off.