On some level, that appears to be somewhat true, but I believe we have to look closely at these
statistics to see what they really say before we start tossing them around like
pure fact.
Here’s what I mean:
One source for these numbers, which I found quoted in a CBS
News article, is the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which describes itself as “a
not for profit corporation formed in 2013 to provide free online public access
to accurate information about gun-related violence in the United States.” Note
the words “gun-related violence.”
In the wake of actual mass murders in El Paso, Texas and
Dayton, Ohio, in which lone shooters with military-style weaponry went into
crowds of innocent civilians and shot dozens of people seemingly at random, there
arises a need to differentiate between “mass
murder” and “gun-related violence.”
For example, I recently wrote a Facebook post that quoted
statistics from Mother Jones, an admittedly liberal magazine and online
publication generally known for accurate reporting. Mother Jones categorizes “mass
shooting” as any incident in which three or more people were killed. I had gone
to the Mother Jones database to determine the rate of carnage that has occurred
since the Sandy Hook murders in December 2012, in which young children were slaughtered
at an elementary school.
Here is what I wrote:
It has been 2,425 days
since 20 children, aged 6-7, were slaughtered along with six adults at the
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Since that time,
according to Mother Jones, America has suffered 52 more mass shootings that
left 424 people dead and 900 people wounded, including two in less than 24
hours this week.
Let me say that again.
There have been 52 mass shootings since the murder of 6- and 7-year-old
children that was finally supposed to bring about some sensible gun laws in
this country...except that it didn't. I don't know what else
to say about that except these numbers speak for themselves
Now compare that number—52 mass shootings since 2012—with the
250-plus reported by CBS News in 2019 alone and you have a serious disconnect. Here’s
why:
I took a look at the Gun Violence Archive quoted by CBS and
discovered that it counts virtually every time someone shoots off a gun at
someone other than his girlfriend, his wife or himself. A quick scan of GVA’s
spreadsheet told me that in the vast majority of the shootings it reported, the
number of dead victims was either 1 or 0.
What were included—in
addition to shootings like El Paso, Dayton and the garlic festival in California—were
shots fired during fights in church parking lots, family feuds, drug deals gone
haywire, gang violence, drive-by shootings and even a shooting during a funeral
procession for a dead rap musician.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that any of the above
examples of people being killed by guns is any less tragic than any other, and I’m
not suggesting that America’s gun problem only kicks into play when three or
more people are killed. What I am
saying is that social media is notorious for throwing around rumors, speculation,
political opinion, distortion, deflection, trolling, misconceptions and
outright lies which are masqueraded as facts, when facts they certainly are
not.
In addition, we have a tendency to look at scare headlines
on Facebook, Twitter and other places and absorb them through osmosis into our
daily dialogue without giving them a complete read or even thinking about what
they mean. This is a dangerous way to get our news and an even more dangerous
way to form our opinions.
I’d point out that Mother Jones could easily have blasted
out a liberal talking point that greatly inflated the seriousness of gun
violence in America but chose instead to take the more conservative, more
consistent approach to the issue of “mass shooting.” I’d also suggest that GVA
is probably honest in its reporting, too, but the numbers it reports and the way it records them are vastly
different than the way they are being portrayed on social media.
We have known for some time that critical thinking is all
but dead in this country and that many of our citizens only see, read and hear
what they want to believe, and that it is only getting worse under the current administration. What I believe is that this variation in the way gun deaths are reported is one more example that
proves that theory to be true.
* * *
Don’t take my word for these statistics. Below are two links
to the databases described above. You can click the links and read the numbers for yourself.
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