Fact-checkers like to portray themselves as disinterested investigators, a modern-day version of Joe Friday of “Dragnet,” seeking only the truth and attempting to shield you from misinformation. In reality, especially when it comes to reporting involving firearms, they’re more like Barney Fife of “The Andy Griffith Show,”—a bumbling incompetent.
It would be funny. If it wasn’t a serious problem.
Like Fife, who can only be trusted with a single bullet that must be kept in his buttoned-down shirt pocket—not his gun—when a fact-checker attempts to determine the truth or falsity of a claim involving firearms or the Second Amendment, we’d all be better off if they simply held their fire.
In the aftermath of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the left 18 dead—many of them elementary school students—CNN invited Sen Chris Murphy, (D-Conn.) on the air to once again push for new gun control laws. During the interview with host Erin Burnett, Murphy made a claim that PolitiFact decided to check: “Most of these killers tend to be 18, 19 years old.”
PolitiFact looked at the evidence and decided that Murphy’s statement was “Mostly True” because: “That’s largely accurate when looking at school shootings alone, according to a Washington Post database of school shootings since 1999. The database did include shootings that did not result in a death, and the share of teenagers committing mass shootings overall is smaller.”
When prompted for evidence of his claim that most mass “killers” tend to be 18 or 19 years old, Murphy’s office pointed PolitiFact to a database maintained by The Washington Post that tracks every school shooting—whether anyone was actually shot or not—since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado.
However, a look at that database, doesn’t support Murphy’s claim for several reasons.
First, Murphy claimed that a majority of campus killers were 18 or 19 years old. So, only cases where shooting resulted in death should count. Of the 58 incidents in the database where one or more students were killed on campus (two cases where the killings were ruled accidents were not counted), eight were committed by 18- or 19-year-olds. Eight.
How does 8 cases out of 58 total—or 14%—become “most”?
Here’s where PolitiFact reporter Louis Jacobson starts carrying water. First, he decides to use the database as it is and count all shootings, whether or not anyone was injured or killed. That gets us a total of 239 cases. But even if you expand your count to all the cases in the Post database, you still only get a total of 22 incidents where the shooter was 18 or 19 years old. That’s a rate of just 9 percent! Still nowhere near “most.”
No, this becomes “Mostly True,” because despite earlier claiming that the “fact-check will focus on whether ‘most of these killers tend to be 18, 19 years old’,” Jacobson does nothing of the sort. Murphy’s statement only begins to become true if you count shootings rather than killings, and if you decide that “18, 19 years old” really translates into 19 years old and younger.
One wonders if Jacobson even realized what he was doing.
When the Post analyzed these shootings, it found that more than two-thirds were committed by shooters younger than 18. The analysis found that the median age for school shooters was 16.
So, using this criteria, Murphy is correct, even slightly understating the case.
He is? Really?! He said most of the killers were 18 or 19 years old. That is flat-out false. Jacobson turns this into “younger than 18” and mere “shooters” for some reason to raise it to “Mostly True.”
If Jacobson had gone looking for context, he might have found out why Murphy was pushing his 18 or 19 years old line—because all of the school shooters under the age of 18 were not legally eligible to purchase a gun in the first place. Murphy wants to raise the age on being able to legally purchase firearms to 21 years of age—or even older (some have suggested 25 years of age)—from 18 years old, where it is in many states today.
Murphy’s statement was false. The evidence that he pointed to to “prove” his claim showed that what he said was false. To PolitiFact, the effort to expand gun control through a broader narrative was more important than the truth.
But we really shouldn’t be surprised by failures such as this. Second Amendment advocates, firearms enthusiasts and people who simply grew up around guns see these errors everywhere they turn in the media. Fact-checkers, nearly all of whom are journalists, are a product of their background and environment. They are sympathetic to one side of the debate and it’s nearly impossible for them to break out of the self-created bubble.
Why does this happen? Why does it continue? The answer lies in sunny Florida.
The Poynter Institute is a journalism education organization based in St. Petersburg, Fla., that is also home to PolitiFact and the International Fact-Checking Network—a sort of accreditation body for fact-checking organizations around the world. A quick scan through their available courses shows a wide variety of courses, from “Fundamentals of Editing” to “Vertical Video for Creators and Journalists,” and… “How to Cover Gun Violence and the Gun Debate in America.”
Courses can cost anywhere from $50 to more than $1,500, with some available free thanks to sponsorships. The webinar on covering “Gun Violence” and the “Gun Debate in America,” is free, thanks to The Joyce Foundation, which lists one of its primary public policy focus areas as “Gun Violence Prevention & Justice Reform.”
So, it should come as little surprise that one of the journalists called on to teach other journalists how to cover the “Gun Debate in America” is Jennifer Mascia of the Michael Bloomberg-backed “The Trace,” and not Stephen Gutowski of “The Reload.” To inform journalists of the legal issues is Jake Charles of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University (now at Pepperdine University’s Rick J. Caruso School of Law), not Dave Kopel of the Independence Institute or Stephen P. Halbrook of the 2nd Amendment Law Center. And to enlighten them on the social issues and impacts, Garen J. Wintemute of UC Davis’ Centers for Violence Prevention, not John Lott, Jr., of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
With this sort of one-sided sourcing, is it at all surprising that fact-checks like the one described above (and that one is not a one-off; several others are recounted in my book) get published? And, for journalism organizations that pride themselves on a “open and honest corrections policy,” that fact-based critiques like the one above are ignored and dismissed?
Fact-checkers play this game on a vast array of topics, and they’re uniformly bad on a majority of them. If they can’t be trusted to make an honest call on what is something that is as black-and-white as the numbers in a database, then why would we trust them on more nuanced claims on a variety of public policy disputes?
Fact-checkers aren’t about checking facts, they’re about removing certain public policy disputes from the public dialogue and shutting down debate. You think that 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds have Second Amendment rights? Well, here’s a “Mostly True” fact-check showing that these kids are dangerous school shooters.
Fact-checkers can’t be trusted, and they shouldn’t be. As news consumers, it’s important not to offload critical thinking skills to self-appointed arbiters of truth known as journalists. Too often, the “truth” they’re telling you is simply a lie.
This article is adapted from “Fact-Checking Frauds: How Fact-Checkers Distract, Deceive, and Distort Our Politics,” available now on Amazon.com, and in audiobook form on Audible or Apple Books. You can find Matthew Hoy's Hoystory On Air podcast at hoystory.substack.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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