How big of a problem is gun violence, especially in public schools? The flurry of national reporting on recent mass shootings harkens back to the 1990’s when black churches were supposedly being indiscriminately torched. It turns out the Great Black Church Burning was a hoax; more on that later.
The Left seeks to create the perception that there is an epidemic of mass shootings. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Elizabeth Warren may deem gun violence “an emergency,” but the numbers suggest otherwise. I guess we should define what constitutes a “mass shooting.”
According to the Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012 defines mass killings as three or more killings in a single incident; however the Act does not define mass shootings. Media outlets such as CNN and some crime violence research groups such as the Gun Violence Archive define mass shootings as involving "four or more shot (injured or killed) in a single incident, at the same general time and location, not including the shooter.”
In a recent column John Stossel pointed out that some in the media claimed that in 2021 there were shootings at “hundreds of schools, “and that it was “an almost daily occurrence.” This is patently false. The U.S. Department of Education reported 235 school shootings last year. That figure is so outrageous that even NPR had to check its veracity. It turns out; NPR was able to confirm only 11 shootings.
During the Obama years, the media claimed the U.S. has “the most mass shootings of anywhere in the world.” John Lott, President of the Crime Prevention Research Center and author of “More Guns, Less Crime,” has spent much of his career correcting faulty studies and outright media lies. According to Lott, this myth is the creation of Alabama Associate Professor Adam Lankford. Again, from Stossel’s piece: “Lankford claimed that since 1966, there were 90 mass public shooters in the U.S., more than in any other country; says Lott, “Lankford claimed complete data were available from 171 countries. But in fact, many governments don’t collect such data and as Stossel points out, “even fewer have information from before the days of the internet.”
In fact, the U.S. isn’t anywhere near the top of the list, trailing such places such as Norway, Finland and Switzerland, even though the U.S. has far more many guns than those countries.
The reporting on gun violence is reminiscent of the way in which the media covered the burning of black churches in the 1990’s. President Clinton declared “Racial hostility is the driving force behind the church burnings.” Again, none of it was true. It turns out the whole “epidemic of hatred” fraud was initiated by the Center for Democratic Renewal, an Atlanta-based group that admitted their mission is to “work with progressive activists and organizations to build a movement to counter right-wing rhetoric and public policy initiatives.”
The CDR released a report purporting to show a surge in black church arsons from 1990-1998. A compliant media was more than happy to repeat the falsehoods. According to columnist Michael Fumento, there were, then, 2,200 stories written on the subject, including three huge layouts in USA Today. The actual number of church burnings dropped dramatically from 1,420 in 1980 to 520 in 1994.
Fumento writes:” The CDR regularly ignored fires set by blacks and those that occurred in the early part of the decade, and labelled fires arson that were not…”
Whether it’s church fires or gun crimes, the actual numbers belie the media hype. The anti-gunners’ end game is to incrementally chip away at our Second Amendment rights. They are attempting to hoodwink the public into accepting “common sense” gun legislation in order to reduce “mass shootings” which they claim have reached epidemic proportions. What they are really trying to reduce is the number of Americans who legally own firearms. If you value your constitutional liberties, you must remain vigilant and informed, so as to not fall prey to the disinformation campaign being waged by leftist politicians and their media lapdogs trying to erode those liberties