Gun Control Group Posts Massive School Shooting Lie... Sick Manipulation
If you’ve been online at all recently, you’ve probably seen the headline: “291 School Shootings In America Since 2013.”
That claim or a variation of it has been repeated by many mainstream media publications… but is it true? The answer is mostly “no,” yet supposedly unbiased news sources keep treating it as fact without admitting just how far it is skewed.
The alarming number of 291 school shootings in the last five years comes from the “Everytown for Gun Safety” organization, which is a leftist gun control group supported by liberal figures such as Julianne Moore, Michael Bloomberg and Shannon Watts.
In order to arrive at such a high number, the Everytown group has blatantly and deceptively padded the statistics to include incidents that almost no reasonable person would consider a “school shooting” — while pretending that the 291 number is an accurate count of mass shootings in America.
The group’s own website includes an interactive map with details of the shootings it is counting, but one look at some of the details makes it clear that they’re stretching the definition to push an anti-gun agenda.
Here are some examples. These are taken directly from Everytown for Gun Safety’s site, and are being used to make “school shootings” look more common than they are.
“A 10-year-old student attempted to throw a chair at his teacher during class, and was then forcibly removed from the classroom by an armed police officer,” stated Everytown.
“While being escorted out, the student hit the police officer in his belt, discharging the officer’s handgun, firing into the floor. No injuries were reported,” continued the site.
The news report of the incident clarified that the aggressively fighting student had purposely reached into the cop’s holster and deliberately pulled the trigger. Again, nobody was hurt.
That’s obviously an alarming situation, but re-read the description. A trained, certified, badge-carrying police officer’s gun discharged during the course of his official duty, while he was trying to stop a violent kid. This is what Everytown is counting as a “school shooting” and adding to their 291 count!
How about this one? “As an unidentified school employee arrived at work in the morning, he went to lock his handgun in his car’s glove compartment while parked in the school lot,” said the gun control organization, based on a local news report.
“He then unintentionally discharged the gun, shooting through a window in the car. Police announced the man was licensed to carry the handgun, and that licensed school employees are allowed the have a gun locked in a car on campus, and therefore no charges would be filed.”
Again, it looks like some people need to refresh their knowledge of proper gun handling, but this incident didn’t even happen in a school. It was in a car located in the parking lot.
The school allowed employees to lock guns on campus and the employee had a carry license — nobody even broke the law and no charges were filed, but Everytown counts this as a “school shooting!”
As a side note, it’s worth pointing out that armed and properly trained teachers could possibly have prevented the tragedy in Florida. Yet gun control groups like Everytown are listing legally-armed school officials as the enemy.
Here’s another one that happened in the parking lot of an adult college — not even a school attended by children — and nobody was injured.
“An unidentified man drove into a campus parking lot and, in view of a group of students, fired a handgun multiple times into the air from the car, before driving off,” wrote the Everytown site.
According to the news source, the person who fired those shots into the air didn’t attend the college and the location had nothing to do with it.
We could go on and on with similar incidents, but you get the point. If you’d like, click around on their interactive map and take a look for yourself.
Do you see what they are doing? In order to push a gun control agenda, they are including news reports that no reasonable person would call a “school shooting,” and hoping that nobody bothers to check the details.
At best it’s deceptive number padding, and at worst it is outright lying.
Nobody disputes that we should work toward less crime in America. In fact, that’s why many conservatives believe in lawful gun ownership: Not to increase crime, but to lower it.
Not a single sane individual of any political party wants to see another school shooting. In order to talk about solutions and have a genuine discussion, however, we must begin from a position of facts and honesty.
“Everytown” and other gun control groups apparently don’t care about honesty. By starting with deception and exaggeration, they’ve shown that they aren’t serious about having an open debate about gun laws.
It’s about a hidden agenda, and they will use whatever distorted headlines are necessary to push their objective. The jig is up, and Americans are on to the game.
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