The media ran with a crazy statistic yesterday that there have been 18 school shootings this year already. But there’s a big problem – it’s completely wrong.
Surprisingly, the Washington Post went after the stat and debunked it!!
Stop saying that there have been 18 school shootings in America this year. It's not true. My story, with @dataeditor:https://t.co/Sa3lmYHTbC
— John Woodrow Cox (@JohnWoodrowCox) February 15, 2018
As their article explains, the stat comes from the execrable EveryTown anti-gun nut website.
It is a horrifying statistic. And it is wrong.
Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counted as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.Also listed on the organization’s site is an incident from Jan. 20, when at 1 a.m. a man was shot at a sorority event on the campus of Wake Forest University. A week later, as a basketball game was being played at a Michigan high school, someone fired several rounds from a gun in the parking lot. No one was injured, and it was past 8 p.m., well after classes had ended for the day, but Everytown still labeled it a school shooting.
Everytown explains on its website that it defines a school shooting as “any time a firearm discharges a live round inside a school building or on a school campus or grounds.”
Yeah that’s a buncha BS. And they know it, but they’ll still push it out because they have an anti-gun agenda that is so dishonest, it’s practically a cult.