Gun Nut: Most School Shootings Not Real
Gun nuts could barely contain their glee when former Daily Caller reporter Charles Johnson known for his accuracy and attention to detail, went on a Twitter truth quest to debunk school shooting statistics published this week by Everytown, a gun-control advocacy group.
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Everytown’s most recent report shows 74 school shootings since the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown. The umbrella group, made up of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Shannon Watts’ Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, is clear about how they arrive at that tally: they count school shootings as anytime a gun goes off inside a school building or grounds. But Johnson, intrepid journalist that he is, was skeptical. In what may be the most tortuous sentence ever constructed, he wrote, “It’s not a school shooting when someone goes and shoots a specific person on campus. It’s a shooting that happens to take place at school.”
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CNN took the bait and dissected Everytown’s list to come to their own count, settling on 15 school shootings, defined as a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school.
The crux of Johnson’s and now CNN’s position is that shootings that arise from arguments, or gang violence, or suicides, aren’t, as Johnson put it, “mass school shootings and shouldn't be treated as such.” It’s important to note the only person using the word “mass” is Johnson. Everytown says that they document as many school shootings as they see reported in the media.
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So Johnson “debunked” something that Everytown never claimed. But he was proving a point here: that some school shootings count and others don’t. In Johson’s view, most of the incidents where guns have gone off inside a school are “fake”—i.e., they don’t count as school shootings.
So how many students have to die before it counts as a “school shooting”? Is a school with students in gangs an automatic disqualification? Let’s look at a few and figure out Johnson’s twisted logic together.
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In April, a gunman at Kent State University in Ohio shot himself during an argument with two women. Hearing gunfire, administrators put the school on lockdown. Frightened students tweeted photos of armed and ready police. Freshman McKenzie King, who happened to be a student at Chardon High School where three students were killed in a 2012 school shooting, hid in her room. “Is this for real, am I going through it once more?" she thought. “I got really scared then.”
Sorry, McKenzie—doesn’t count.
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Here, a former student pulled a fire alarm to attract potential victims before threatening his roommate, who escaped. The former student had built several bombs and was armed with multiple weapons. He had written a manifesto in which his hero pulled the fire alarm, “then went to grab his guns … they all started screaming and scrambling over each other, he looked around and fired and fired and fired.” Luckily, he shot and killed himself before anyone else was hurt.
Just a random incident. Could have happened anywhere. Doesn’t count.
