So-called gun violence is a problem. So long as one person is killed, it will be a problem. What differentiates someone like me from someone on the anti-gun side is that I see all non-gun violence as an equal problem, not something to be ignored. After all, our non-gun homicide rate is higher than many developed nations’ total homicide rate, so ignoring anything that doesn’t involve a gun is stupid.
Yet, for many people, the big fear isn’t some random armed robbery becoming more violent. It’s a mass shooting or their kid being caught up in something like Parkland or Uvalde, where the shooting is at a school.
And the way the media reports it, I can’t say I don’t understand why they’re afraid.
However, the truth of the matter is that not only are these threats drastically overstated, but a couple of the databases that claim to collect information on these incidents know they’re overstated. I can prove it.
Let’s start with school shootings for a moment.
Now, there are a lot of ways to define it, but let’s start with what people think when they hear about a school shooting in their community. Obviously, it’s a shooting at a school, but they also tend to think of it as when students are in some kind of danger.
If we’re being as broad as possible, it wouldn’t necessarily involve anyone being hurt, but for it to represent a threat to student safety, one would imagine students being present.
The K-12 School Shooting Database is an oft-cited source for data on these incidents.
They look at incidents that take place on a school campus in some manner. However, what they fail to do is limit it in any way, shape, or form beyond that. For example, they’ve cited shootings that take place in the middle of the night during the summer, when no students are present, and some guy gets hit in the parking lot that is open to access from the general public.
Now, is that the same thing as Uvalde? Of course not.
However, they created their criteria to include such things because it inflates the total number of shootings they can report.
They’re not alone, either.
The Gun Violence Archive ostensibly tracks all incidents of so-called gun violence. However, they’re generally cited for one particular subset of the data they collect, namely the number of mass shootings. Yet while most other efforts to track mass murders involving a firearm focus on, you know, them actually being mass murders, GVA uses another overly broad definition of mass shooting. This involves four or more people being shot, not counting the shooter. No mention of fatalities or anything else.
So while some data sets show there have been just over a dozen mass shootings this year, GVA claims there have been hundreds.
This, of course, alarms people to no end. The GVA’s numbers get repeated ad nauseam by the media and anti-gun activists, but it’s hard to look at the numbers and how they’re reported and not see an attempt at deception.
Oh, both databases have a page that has their methodology on it, though the K-12 School Shooting Database doesn’t do a great job of making its definitions clear. However, looking at their data makes it clear they include incidents that were never a threat to students or staff. GVA’s definition is on a separate page, and in fairness, they do make it easy to see, but people just looking at the data won’t understand it and a lot of people don’t realize that the definition used isn’t what they’re thinking.
And since the media often reports these numbers without an associated definition, it’s not difficult to see that these are tools for misinformation, where both databases lie with statistics.
They know the real problem isn’t that severe. They know school shootings aren’t as bad as claimed, or that mass shootings are actually pretty rare. They also know that gun control will never happen if people aren’t terrified.
So they manipulate the data, overstate the issue, and hope no one looks too deeply.
They know the problem isn’t that bad. They just don’t want you to know it’s not that bad.
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