Everytown USA – one of Michael Bloomberg’s astroturf gun-grabber groups – circulated a map claiming that there had been 74 school shootings substantially similar to Newtown since the Sandy Hook shooting.
But what have we told you about anti-gun groups?
Distrust but verify. Then, almost inevitably, resume distrusting (emphasis added):
The news outlet circulated the graphical map, which came from the group Everytown for Gun Safety, after a shooting that occurred Tuesday at a high school in Oregon which left two dead, including the 15 year-old gunman.
Everytown for Gun Safety, which is backed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, headlined their graphic “School Shootings in America Since Sandy Hook,” suggesting that the shootings it listed had a link of some kind to Sandy Hook — in which Adam Lanza killed 26 people at an elementary school.
CNN and various other media outlets used the graphic in news segments.
Of course they did.
But…
“So on Wednesday, CNN took a closer look at the list, delving into the circumstances of each incident Everytown included,” reads CNN’s report.
It acknowledged that many of the shootings listed by Everytown did not fit the profile of a Sandy Hook-type shooting, in which the attacks are seemingly random.
Instead, CNN said, “some of the other incidents on Everytown’s list included personal arguments, accidents and alleged gang activities and drug deals.” (RELATED: School Shooting Claims Debunked)
“CNN determined that 15 of the incidents Everytown included were situations similar to the violence in Oregon – a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school,” said CNN.
The number and severity of school shootings has actually dropped, along with the overall murder rate, over the past 20 years. And kids are vastly less likely to be shot in school than in, say, a Chicago neighborhood.
But you’ve got to admit that an error rate of 80% or 90% is actually 10-20% better than Bloomberg usually does, no?
Another researcher, Charles Johnson, came up with only 6-7 that were Newtown or Columbine “school shootings” rather than “shootings that happened somewhere in or near a school” as the gun control advocates county them.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/06/10/wow-journalist-attempts-to-debunk-anti-gun-groups-list-of-school-shootings-in-america-since-sandy-
hook-heres-what-he-found/#
School shootings do happen and each one is a genuine tragedy. But gun control advocates have inflated the number dramatically for political gain. That’s a bigger tragedy.
I saw that Media Matters for America tried (in vain) to refute Johnson’s thorough debunking of Everytown’s inflated statistic. My curiosity prompted me to examine MMFA’s three examples that supposedly demonstrated Johnson’s cold-heartedness. One of their examples was a shooting that didn’t even happen on school grounds but was a domestic dispute between a previously-married couple (who worked at the same school) turned tragic. How is it a school shooting if it doesn’t even happen near a school? Guess the same way a couple of working buddies would go to the bar and get into a fight that would be characterized as workplace violence?
MN law requires law enforcement agencies to report certain crimes and offenses to the school s/he attends if they’re committed by a student, even when the crime was not committed on school premises and/or not during school hours.
They used to be primarily status-type offenses; drinking, possession, etc. I believe that they have now included more violent crimes including domestic situations, “bullying” (of course), and sexual offenses. A specific form was to be completed by the investigating officer and forwarded to the kids’ high school.
I suspect that the compilation of such (formerly) private data (until adjudicated) is prime for misuse, misquotation, and intentional misinformation, such as the type mentioned here.
Correction: such data would still be classified as private if the offender wasn’t an adult (18+ YOA) at the time of the incident.