Everytown for Gun Safety is an activist organization against law-abiding citizens carrying firearms. It was founded by Michael Bloomberg and Shannon Watts, and as The Blaze reports, headlines that 1.37 school shootings have occurred “every single week in the U.S. since the deadly 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.”
No surprise, when it came out with its list of ‘every school shooting since Sandy Hook,’ it crammed every conceivable case onto it so as to make it appear like armed criminals were attacking our schools every week.
Huffington Post editor Mark Gongloff mapped Everytown’s data, and inevitably, the figure went viral. So viral, in fact, that news anchor Shepard Smith was repeatedly citing the “74 shootings” figure on his Fox News program Tuesday afternoon. In any event, here is the map:
So, using Sandy Hook as the starting point and running until today’s tragic Oregon school shooting, what do these datapoints represent? Well, it turns out that they represent all sorts of things. They turn out to be “assaults, homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings” that happen “inside a school building or on school or campus grounds.”
Let’s just note for the record here that 95%+ of these areas are in so-called “gun-free zones” before moving on. In other words, they have perfect gun control regimes in theory.
Anyway, journalist Charles C. Johnson wanted a closer look at the cases that Everytown was portraying as “school shootings.” This is what he found:
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476502106111610880
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476502666059579393
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476503668531802113
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476504027555835905
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476504525826568193
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476504791799980032
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476505583336431616
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476506804810035200
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476507234105454592
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476509835496665089
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476512120280854528
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476512944054751232
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476514284629815296
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476514565178421249
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476519236106326016
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476520311651700736
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476520918093533184
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476522167354417152
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476523170048909312
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476525330086100992
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476526845630746624
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476529226107994113
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476530093724950528
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476530967058718723
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476532467461931008
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476533217726459904
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476534112946106369
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476535085324201984
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476538872428376064
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476539591671812096
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476540752952975360
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476541949881487361
https://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/statuses/476543634582421505
Whether or not one wants to dismiss all this and say these cases “technically” fit, gang-related violence and suicides are not really what people have in mind when it comes to “school shootings.” In other words, this list was compiled to give the public an exaggerated impression of how many school shootings have taken place.
No matter what that number actually is – it’s too many. But the solution to stopping criminals with guns won’t ever be taking guns away from their potential victims.
In a nation where there are 44,000,000 firearms owners who are not committing gun homicides every year, and roughly eleven thousand murders and nineteen thousand suicides (as of 2013), one has to ask the question: why should people forfeit their right to self-defense on behalf of a tiny minority of criminals? And where is the evidence that would solve the problem and make people safer anyway?
What we need are real solutions: Those may include bullet-proof blankets, tornado shelters, armed police on duty around schools, security guards in tough school districts, metal detectors or better mental health screening for rampage violence tendencies – but limiting the self-defense capability of law-abiding citizens is not the solution some wish it would be when it comes to stopping violent criminals.