Misleading School Shooting Statistics

[Dale00]

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...

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.

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/06/146537-everytown-map-74-school-shootings-since-newtown-goes-viral-33-questionable-entries/

Another example of dishonesty by gun control advocates.

It would interesting to look at how many school students die or are seriously injured traveling in cars to or from school. Then make the argument that transporting students in cars should be outlawed. I'm sure school buses are much safer. I'm sure that thousands of students are harmed in this way every year. Outlaw cars or paint them yellow and certify drivers or do something!

 

[tulsanewb]

Surprisingly, CNN seems to be calling them out on this as well, to some extent:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/11/us/school-shootings-cnn-number/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

 

[loudshirt]

Just so I do not have to start my own thread. I looked at the everytown report. The thing that jumped out to me the most was all the shootings that kids used improperly stored legally owned firearms. If you improperly store a firearm where a kid can get if you need to be the one getting locked up. Especially for the "accidents" that happen with kids under 10yrs old.

The disclaimer at the bottom of the report explained what they considered a school shooting. I also did not notice any in Vermont and I think only 1 in Arizona, while CA, IL, and some other strict gun control places had quite a fair number

 

[Dale00]

Just so I do not have to start my own thread. I looked at the everytown report. The thing that jumped out to me the most was all the shootings that kids used improperly stored legally owned firearms. If you improperly store a firearm where a kid can get if you need to be the one getting locked up. Especially for the "accidents" that happen with kids under 10yrs old.

The disclaimer at the bottom of the report explained what they considered a school shooting. I also did not notice any in Vermont and I think only 1 in Arizona, while CA, IL, and some other strict gun control places had quite a fair number

Excellent observation. It would be fun to correlate the Everytown school shooting statistics with the Brady ratings for each state. Looks like the conclusion would be that stricter gun control laws lead to more school shootings.

 

[Dale00]

Nice article on this and related gun control untruths: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/380108/lying-about-school-shootings-charles-c-w-cooke

... Everytown is not the only advocate of gun control that is engaged in a concerted effort to convince the public that gun violence is on the rise. At his White House event yesterday, President Obama insinuated that the United States was uncommonly awash with shootings. “We’re the only developed country on Earth where this happens,” he said.

And it happens now once a week. And it’s a one-day story. There’s no place else like this.

Later, the president added:

So the country has to do some soul-searching about this. This is becoming the norm.

This isn’t true. But it doesn’t matter. As Pew reported last year, the American public remains largely unaware that the last two decades have seen a quite remarkable drop in gun violence. Obama presumably knows this. ”Despite national attention to the issue of firearm violence,” Pew wrote, “most Americans are unaware that gun crime is lower today than it was two decades ago. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, today 56% of Americans believe gun crime is higher than 20 years ago and only 12% think it is lower.”

The truth?

National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence plunged through the 1990s, but has declined less dramatically since 2000.

Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm-assaults, robberies and sex crimes-was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over two decades.

Don’t want to take Pew’s word for it? The Obama administration’s own Department of Justice agrees:

According to DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. gun-related homicides dropped 39 percent over the course of 18 years, from 18,253 during 1993, to 11,101 in 2011. During the same period, non-fatal firearm crimes decreased even more, a whopping 69 percent. The majority of those declines in both categories occurred during the first 10 years of that time frame. Firearm homicides declined from 1993 to 1999, rose through 2006, and then declined again through 2011. Non-fatal firearm violence declined from 1993 through 2004, then fluctuated in the mid-to-late 2000s.

As Forbes’s Larry Bell notes, this is the “gun-control hypesters’ worst nightmare.” ”More people are buying firearms, while firearm-related homicides and suicides are steadily diminishing.” I would only add that these drops have happened while the gun laws have generally been liberalized, not tightened. Do we really want to start screwing with the trend so that we can all feel good about ourselves?

For good measure, Obama also suggested that the United States does not have a background-check system in place, taking aim at,

the idea that, for example, we couldn’t even get a background check bill in to make sure that if you’re going to buy a weapon you have to actually go through a fairly rigorous process so that we know who you are, so you can’t just walk up to a store and buy a semi-automatic weapon?

This idea, he griped, “makes no sense.” Indeed it does not. Federal law already requires all stores in all states to run background checks on all purchases - semi-automatic or not. How it is possible that the president can simultaneously consider his failure to amend the nation’s firearms laws to be his biggest failure and have no idea what they actually are?

The answer is that he doesn’t care. Indeed, nobody involved in the campaign for stricter gun laws seems to care much about the details at all. This confuses me. In what other area does the Left allow itself to remain so shamefully ignorant of basic facts? In what other area are extremely important distinctions - such as the difference between ”semi-automatic” and “automatic” weapons - dismissed as “semantics”? In what other area does the Left send people such as this and this out to debate and to embarrass themselves on television? In what other area would the Democratic party put up with its leader confirming that he has absolutely no clue how the laws he wishes to amend actually work, and slip into praising Australian gun confiscation? In what other area would the party of government waste its time going obsessively after a type of weapon that is responsible for about one tenth as many deaths each year as are hammers? It’s a mystery....

 

[Dale00]

Statistics from a reputable source to refute the fearmongers: [url]http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/11/are-school-homicides-becoming-the-norm
[/URL]

the bureau's figures only go through the 2010–11 school year, thus excluding the Sandy Hook massacre and everything since. Twenty children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook, making the event bloody enough to cause a spike in 2012–13 all by itself. We don't have enough data to say for certain whether that year was an outlier like 2006–07 or the start of a new trend, but the authors do offer some tentative numbers for the period since the massacre. According to "preliminary counts from media reports," they write, the U.S. saw "17 school-associated violent deaths between December 15, 2012, and November 14, 2013"—11 homicides and six suicides, with six of the dead being of student age.

This much is clear: If you're wondering where kids are likely to die, the answer plainly isn't a classroom. (Quoting the BJS report one more time: "During the 2010–11 school year, 11 of the 1,336 homicides among school-age youth ages 5–18 occurred at school.") And in the period for which we have clear data, the school homicide rate moved in the same direction as the overall homicide rate: downward.

 

[RugersGR8]

Another article:


http://www.examiner.com/article/did-cnn-just-call-bloomberg-s-everytown-group-liars
Did CNN just call Bloomberg’s ‘Everytown’ group liars?
Dave Workman Seattle Gun Rights Examiner
June 12, 2014