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Neil DeGrasse Tyson Is Getting Roasted For His Tone-Deaf Tweet About The Recent Mass Shootings

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More often than not, Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s tweets can be infuriating when it comes to what they say about popular culture. The celebrity astrophysicist’s comments about the Avengers franchise, Game of Thrones and other science fiction film and television titles almost always provoke a reaction. Since the sexual assault allegations against him went public last year, though, Tyson has kept his infuriating tweets to a minimum. That changed on Sunday when he decided to comment on the recent mass shootings in Texas and Ohio.

“In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings,” the tweet began. From there, it listed several other prominent causes of death “across any 48hrs” — including medical errors and automobile accidents. However, what really ticked people off was Tyson’s concluding thought: “Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.”

Needless to say, people were not happy with Tyson’s evident decision to seemingly tweet against emotional reactions to the horrible events in El Paso and Dayton.


“This is really not the time to be the smug counterfactual guy,” wrote New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb. “Medical errors don’t evolve into ethnic cleansing. The flu didn’t lynch black people to keep them from voting. You’re ridiculously blithe to the implications of ideology-driven violence.”

Most of the responses to Tyson’s tweet offered similar sentiments, though with varying degrees of the very “emotions” that he was hoping to lessen.

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