The San Diego County Gun Owners PAC recently took a look at statistics on “school shootings.” The organization contends the numbers we’re told and that get distributed are greatly inflated.
SDCGO Executive Director Michael Schwartz recently took a look at all the post-Columbine school shootings. Schwartz says that when you break down the alleged 1,100+ events reported by mainstream media, what actually qualifies as a school shooting needs to be more narrowly defined. Using data that’s been made publicly available by Everytown Research & Policy and filtering it, the number of shootings comes to 126. The results of Schwartz’ data analysis have been published on SDCGO’s media arm’s webpage, Gun Owners Radio.
“All sides agree on how horrific and emotionally charged the issue is, but to solve a problem, we first must accurately describe it,” Schwartz writes. “Anti-gun groups throw everything they can into the category of ‘school shooting’ because they want to tie their issue to the emotions voters feel when they see a report about children being harmed. They pad their numbers by including crime that happens near schools and crime that happens when schools aren’t even in session.”
An example used to describe a shooting as a school shooting that most reasonable people would agree does not fit the bill would be a potential drug deal gone wrong. Not just any old drug deal, but one that occurs across the street from a school, at midnight, during summer recess, on a weekend.
Statistically, these kinds of events happen fairly regularly under those circumstances. By filtering out events that don’t meet the classic hallmarks of what a school shooting even is, there’s about one tenth the number of actual school shootings versus what’s reported.
The criteria that Schwartz used to define a school shooting are as follows:
We counted intentional firearm discharges directed at U.S. K-12 schools or at students, employees, security officers, or others in a school-related role. Eligible settings generally included school buildings, grounds, parking lots, and school activities during the school day, arrival, dismissal, or supervised activities. A victim did not have to be injured. We ordinarily excluded accidents, stray fire, unrelated crimes, gang violence, spontaneous personal disputes, and off-campus incidents without compelling evidence of school-related targeting. We allowed documented, explicitly approved exceptions, including certain school-bus incidents, attacks fired from off campus toward schools, and selected borderline cases.
In short, Schwartz notes there’s a more universal and quicker way of describing such shooting events when they come to mind of the general public: “A disgruntled person obtains a gun and targets a school to cause maximum damage and/or the criminal had a connection with that school.”
“When we compiled a list of school shootings, we didn’t find hundreds,” Schwartz writes. “We found that since 1999, there have been 126 total since the 1999 Columbine school shooting. This is significantly smaller than anti-gun groups will have you believe.”
Much like the reporting from the Gun Violence Archive, it appears that Everytown — as well as mainstream media — is putting its thumb on the scale.
The full list is posted over on Gun Owners Radio. Schwartz and his team also welcome feedback on the list. He challenges “anyone to show (him) the incidents (they) are missing, but not by simply sending statistics.” They’re seeking verified accounts: “What specific incidents did we not include and was that incident something the general public thinks of when they hear the term ‘school shooting?’”
Schwartz, SDCGO, and the rest of the team at Gun Owners Radio did some solid reporting on this topic. We’ll be staying in touch with the team to see if they get any feedback on the events they have listed and whether or not any have slipped through the cracks.
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