There’s no denying that what happened in Uvalde, Texas this week was one of the worst mass school shootings in American history.
America is mourning the loss of 19 students and 2 children who were senselessly murdered by a psychopath that took it upon himself to end the lives of so many innocent children, and although I would never in a million years downplay what just happened, it’s important to also consider that this is NOT the norm, regardless of what the Liberal media wants you to believe.
As originally reported by Robby Soave from Reason.com, an NPR article recently claimed that “27 school shootings have taken place so far this year,” which at first glance would give most readers the impression that gun-related killings in schools have been extremely high this year. The problem with this alarming statistic is that it is simply not true.
In order to run defense for the Democrats and push stricter gun laws on the American people, the liberal media is hard at work once again throwing around misleading statistics regarding mass school shootings that most won’t bother to fact check.
When Reason.com further investigated the NPR’s claim that there have been “27 school shootings so far this year”, they quickly found that many of the 27 were in fact shootings that involved disputes between students in parking lots, or after athletic events and almost all of them resulted in one or zero deaths. Of course, any death is tragic, but most of the previous 26 shootings prior to the Robb Elementary shooting were not even close to anything like Uvalde.
We also need to be careful not to lump in school shootings with “mass school shootings” which the NPR and other left-wing media outlets tend to frequently do.
As reported by Reason.com, “Uvalde is a mass school shooting. This is defined in different ways too: an incident in which at least four people (some counters make it three) are shot and/or killed. The Gun Violence Archive counts incidents in which at least four people were shot. Under this definition, many incidents of street crime and domestic violence count as mass shootings, even if no deaths result. A stricter tally of mass school shootings, conducted by criminologists for Scientific American, only includes incidents where the shootings resulted in at least four deaths. Using their criteria, the number of mass school shootings in the U.S. since the year 1966 is 13. These crimes claimed the lives of 146 people in total.”
Clearly, 13 incidents in the last 56 years is a very different statistic than “27 incidents in the last few months”. Not to mention, 13 mass school shootings in 56 years doesn’t push the progressive narrative as far left as the radicals need it to go in order to push through stricter gun laws.
The two statistics are so far apart because they measure very separate things. It’s not even an apples-to-apples comparison.
There’s no doubt that one-off gun incidents are a serious problem in the U.S., and those taking place at schools are no exception. Mass casualty events, however, constitute less than 1 percent of all gun deaths, and it’s important that we clarify the difference when discussing the frequency in which these mass school shootings occur, which according to Reason.com and Gun Violence Archive, are not that frequent at all.
