I was talking to a Christian today about Calvinists and letters to newspapers. Once in a while, in any major newspaper there will be some letter to the editor claiming that all the hurricanes and mass murders are God’s judgment against America. The letters claim that America is becoming more and more wicked, and thus we see this judgment. I am not going to make any claims on America’s current moral state, but if America was getting more wicked and God is punishing America with hurricanes and mass shootings, then God is not doing a very good job at punishing us.

Not only are gun homicides going down, but also mass shootings and the number of people killed in mass shootings.

The second graph needs to be understood in light of the population boom over the same years. The number of shootings has been flat, the number of victims has been flat, the US population has increased about 50%. This represents a massive decrease in mass shootings.

In the same vein, see the Reason.com takes on the myth of increasingly severe tornadoes:

Similarly, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2012 report on trends on weather extremes concludes that there is no evidence for either an increase or a decrease in tornado frequency or intensity.

While the number of strong tornadoes has stayed steady, the rate of deaths from tornados has fallen about 90 percent in the last 90 years, from just under 2 per million in the 1920s to 0.2 per million recently.

And tornado damage, Reason.com references a study that normalizes the data to conclude:

Under several methods, there has been a sharp decline in tornado damage. This decline corresponds with a decline in the reported frequency of the most intense (and thus most damaging) tornadoes since 1950.

If God is judging America with shootings and tornadoes, he just is not doing a good job.