Screen capture of Washington Post headline, May 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.
The headline was dramatic:
More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine. Read that, and you’d think that half the schools in America were being machine gunned down, which is, let’s be honest about it, exactly what the editors of
The Washington Post want you to believe.
But what, exactly, does “experienced gun violence at school” mean? From their methodology:
To calculate how many children were exposed to gunfire in each school shooting, The Post relied on enrollment figures and demographic information from the U.S. Education Department, including the Common Core of Data and the Private School Universe Survey. The analysis used attendance figures from the year of the shooting for the vast majority of the schools. Then The Post deducted 7 percent from the enrollment total because that is, on average, how many students miss school each day, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Reporters subtracted 50 percent from a school’s enrollment if the act of gun violence occurred just before or after the school day.
So, if a firearm was discharged on school grounds during school hours, but no one was struck, 93% of the school’s enrollment “experienced gun violence at school.
- One of the incidents shown by the Post was on November 15, 2021, when an armed 13-year-old boy in Poughkeepsie High School, in Poughkeepsie, New York, fired “several rounds in front of the school, striking multiple vehicles”, but neither killing nor injuring anyone. The Post counted that as 570 students “experiencing gun violence at school”.
- On November 19, 2021, at Hinkley High School in Aurora, Colorado, “Teenagers exchanged gunfire in the parking lot, wounding three students.” The Post counted that as 1,940 students “experiencing gun violence at school,” even though this was a gun battle between gangs, and not an attempt to shoot up the school.
- November 29, 2021, at Cesar Chavez High School in Laveen, Arizona, a 15-year-old boy shot the 16-year-old who had just sold him the gun in a school bathroom. While it was hardly an attempt to shoot up the school, the Post counts this a 2,400 students having “experienced gun violence at school.”
- December 1, 2021 at Sam Rayburn High School, in Pasadena, Texas, a 21-year-old man fired a shot into the air while robbing a student on campus, with no one injured or killed. The Post counts this as 2,530 students “experiencing gun violence at school.”
- February 28, 2022, at Jonesboro High School, in Clayton County, Georgia, a student discharged a weapon in school, hitting nobody. The Post counts this as 1,282 students “experiencing gun violence at school”.
There are many, many more similar examples, of accidents, stray bullets, gang battles and one-on-one fights, things that make up the vast majority of the incidents compiled into the statistics, but which the editors hope you don’t read, which the editors hope the readers will conflate to thousands of Columbines or Marjory Stoneman Douglases.
Given that so many readers do not read closely enough, do not delve more deeply into the stories, the editors can reasonably hope that their propaganda is persuasive. Not lies, per se, but statistics compiled in such a way to have the effect of lies.
Here’s the money line:
The Post has found that at least 185 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults, and another 369 have been injured.
Remember: that’s 185 killed, and 369 injured, since 1999. Both of those numbers are lower than the number killed and injured in Philadelphia so far this year.
Screen capture of The Washington Post’s website main page, May 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.
The
school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by a misfit high school dropout
who was bullied while he was in school due to a “childhood speech impediment” was certainly a terrible thing, but in practicing journalism rather than journalism, by publishing wholly sensationalized but nevertheless misleading statistics, the editors of the
Post are pretty much lying outright in their attempt to push Congress into infringing upon our Second Amendment rights.
The Post had ten, ten! separate articles listed on their website main page on Wednesday morning, most geared toward a push toward unconstitutional gun control, because that’s what the editors do.
The Post, perhaps inadvertently, undermined its own gun control reasoning:
In cases where the source of the gun could be determined, more than 85 percent of shooters brought them from their own homes or obtained them from friends or relatives, according to The Post’s analysis.
The ranks of school shooters include a 6-year-old boy, who killed a classmate after saying he didn’t like her, and a 15-year-old girl, who did the same to a friend for rejecting her romantic overtures.
Seven in 10 of them, however, were under the age of 18, which means that — often because of an adult’s negligence — dozens of children had access to deadly weapons.
In other words, most of the weapons used were legally purchased by other people, people with no criminal intent, and then taken by those who did have criminal intent in mind. The only way that ‘gun control’ stops that is if private ownership of firearms by the law abiding is banned . . . which is, of course, what the editors want anyway.
Supporters of dictatorial government always want a disarmed citizenry. Their fellow travelers in the credentialed media are only too glad to help.
