There were “400 or so mass shootings” in the United States 2015, according to Ahson Saeed Hasan, a Washington, D.C.-based journalist in a recent op-ed. Other news outlets cite nearly identical figures to claim that the number of mass shootings is skyrocketing.

They are all lying.

More precisely, they’re redefining “truth.” Instead of using the long accepted and traditional definition of a mass shooting—four or more people killed in a single event that is not a familicide, terrorist attack, or a gang-related event—they silently and arbitrarily switched to completely different definition created by a self-described anti-gun propagandist.

Now, when Pookie does a drive by of a rival gang and wounds Miguel, Jose, and Clarence, but Clarence gets a round off in return and wings Pookie, that’s now a “mass shooting.”

Yes, the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News and other news outlets have quietly accepted the lies of “Mass Shooting Tracker” as legitimate to push a liberal anti-gun agenda. We can now have dozens of “mass shootings” in a week without a single death.

The actual number of mass shootings in 2015 by traditional measures? Four.

The mainstream media is lying to their readers, and not by tiny degrees.

Sadly, this sort of deception is actively encouraged.

Last week, Tennessee adopted the iconic Barrett .50 BMG rifle as their official state rifle. Christopher Ingraham, an anti-gun activist writing for the Washington Post, ran an absurdly dishonest piece in response, with the requisite sensationalist headline.

Ingraham’s article is nothing more or less than a paraphrasing of a factually-false propaganda piece from the Violence Policy Center, with quotes from the more restrained but equally anti-gun Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Ingraham’s serial dishonesty has been heavily documented at Bearing Arms, but it’s clear that the editors of the Post are more than happy to have him continue deceiving their readers. It serves the Post‘s political agenda to mislead them.

Sadly, Ingraham’s deceptiveness is incredibly common in a mainstream media with heavy liberal bias, and is tame considered to the borderline psychotic rantings out of some media outlets such as the New York Daily News.

Here’s Reality

When you cut through the deception, the lies, and the very redefining of reality in the mainstream media’s Orwellian world, we see the truth in the cold, hard data.

The truth is that the American people have more firearms than at any point previously in American history. There are in excess of 300 million firearms in the hands of American citizens, and more than 100 million of those have been purchased during the seven years of Barack Obama’s Presidency.

While the number of guns has risen dramatically, violence and accidents with guns have not. In fact, accidents with firearms for both adults and children are on a consistent multi-decade decline.

“Gun violence”—which thanks to a dishonest media, includes acts of self-harm—also continue to more guns have entered society. According to FBI data, criminal homicides committed with firearms continue to plummet, to a low of just over 8,100.

We are now experiencing the lowest per-capita homicide rate ever recorded in the history of the United States.

You won’t hear that undeniable fact in the mainstream media, which is manufacturing an “epidemic of gun violence” which simply does not exist.

We can’t have an “honest discussion” about the role of  guns in society when the Democrat Party and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) continually and intentionally lie to the American people about the subject at every possible turn.

The data suggests that Robert Heinlein was indeed correct. An armed society is a polite society.

It’s too bad those who (undeservedly) imagine themselves to be “our betters” simply refuse to deal with that reality.