Someone once talked about “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” People can lie with statistics easily enough. I’ve seen it happen and you have, too. All you have to do is adjust how the data is gathered sufficiently and you can lie without lying, in a manner of speaking.
What I mean is that you can be completely upfront about what data you accumulate, how you accumulate it, and what the actual numbers you gathered are, and still mislead people to think something that simply isn’t true.
Take the term “mass shooting,” for a moment.
On a visceral level, when people hear the term, they think of things like Parkland, Las Vegas, Columbine, and so on. What they’re thinking of are public mass murders that involve a firearm. It’s how most people who gather data define them, too.
But not everyone does, and that’s a problem.
Mass public shootings are heartbreaking events that claim innocent lives and leave entire communities shaken. But instead of addressing the complex causes of these tragedies, some media outlets and politicians rush to exploit these events, using fear to push an agenda that targets lawful gun owners. Let’s break down what’s really happening and why you deserve the full picture.
Manipulating Numbers to Fuel Fear
When the average person hears about “445 mass shootings this year,” it’s natural to feel alarmed. But that number, often reported by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), doesn’t mean what it sounds like. The GVA defines a “mass shooting” as any event where four or more people are injured or killed, lumping together gang violence, domestic disputes, and even robberies.
Contrast that with databases like The Violence Project, which focus specifically on public shootings unrelated to criminal motives like gang activity or domestic violence. By this more focused definition, there have been only a handful of true mass public shootings this year, tragic as those are. The GVA’s inflated numbers mislead the public, creating a sense of chaos that’s weaponized to justify restrictive gun laws.
So we know roughly what the Gun Violence Archive claims, and we know that we’ll see that hysteria repeated everywhere we look, but just how many does The Violence Project report?
Three. In all of 2024, they report just three. Their definition, including the criteria listed above, requires four or more people killed. That’s pretty much what most people think of when they hear the term “mass shooting,” after all, though some might think more or fewer people killed.
Yet those aren’t the numbers the media repeats.
The Violence Project isn’t exactly a pro-gun initiative, either, but they have information on all kinds of shootings. What’s more, their definitions of what data goes where makes perfect sense to anyone who cares to look.
But again, that’s not the reporting we see.
The truth of the matter is that while the Gun Violence Archive uses actual numbers that are what they are, they’ve provided us a prime example of how one can manipulate the perception of an issue by simply changing how one accumulates the numbers in the first place. In all but three of those supposedly 445 “mass shootings,” fewer than four people were killed and most of those were associated with some other criminal action. They weren’t some random cases of some maniac shooting up a movie theater or some other public place.
Yet people don’t think about that. They don’t recognize that. They just think of carnage, and that’s the point.
The entire point here is to gin up fear, to terrify people into believing they’re on borrowed time, that it’s just a matter of moments until a mass murder touches their lives.
It’s lies, damned lies, and the anti-gun narrative.
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