You have probably seen this map; it went viral on the internet almost immediately after it was first published on Twitter last week by and editor at The Huffington Post. It purports to show the locales of the “1.37 deadly school shootings per week,” 74 in all, that have occurred since the December, 2012 Sandy Hook massacre according to Everytown for Gun Safety. That is an anti-gun activist organization founded by Michael Bloomberg and Shannon Watts, and its release that “there have been at least 74 school shootings in America” since Newtown was just what the doctor ordered for the languishing gun control forces.
It’s an intentionally misleading number. Journalist Charles Johnson checked the facts, and these are not all “school shootings” in the sense that the public now understands the term and how honest journalists use it—episodes where someone brings a gun to a school and starts shooting teachers and kids. At least 33 of the “school shootings” just fit the conveniently broad definition used by Everytown for Gun Safety so as to make the strongest impression, fairness and truth be damned. They include not just Columbine and Newtown-type episodes, but also assaults, homicides, suicides, gang fights, and accidents involving guns that happened “inside a school building or on school or campus grounds.”
Yes, someone was shot in or around a school, but the news media doesn’t report those events as “school shootings.” They are only reported that way in the aggregate by anti-gun advocates—and journalists who want to believe anti-gun advocates—to distort the extent and character of gun-related violence. I think 41 school shootings, if that is the real number, is bad enough to raise my concerns, but I resent, and everyone should resent, the continuing effort of the gun-control lobby to use fear-mongering, distortions and intentional deception to win a policy argument by, in essence, cheating.
Why do the facts have to be hyped and exaggerated? If the kind of gun control being advocated is wise and reasonable, it should be adopted on that basis, and because of real data, not manipulated, deceptive distortions. The fact that the advocates for more gun regulations continue to seek their goals through unethical tactics should cause everyone to distrust their motives, intentions and promises as well as their rhetoric. You don’t want to disarm Americans so the government can dominate them, you say? Why should we believe that, when you lie about everything else?
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Ethics Alarms 
If you can control the information people receive you can control the people themselves. That is the mantra.
Pretty much. The fact that this is anything but some kind of power grab, whether for outright political power or due to moral righteousness, should have been pretty clear when their only arguments and responses were based on emotions and feelings rather than any type or reasonable or logical approaches.
Nope. It’s always just power or moral imposition for the anti-gun nuts.
“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”
~H. L. Mencken
Our host thinks Mencken can’t be used constructively; truth or otherwise is beside the point, for that criterion.
I wish I knew what you were trying to say. I agree with the sentiment in the quote (obviously), but Mencken is too awful a messenger; kind of like Lillian Hellman’s pronouncemnts on ethics and morality.
An addendum to the regular post: a Washington Post letter to the editor calling for gun control quoted the bogus figures for “school shootings,” and the Post made no comment or corrections. Fake fearmongering stats successfully implanted!
Fearmongering is necessary, Jack. These people advance their agenda by emotional arguments. They need not be based in reality or truth.