How (and Why) the Media Deliberately Inflates the Numbers on School Shootings

It’s already no secret that the left and their partners in the mainstream media want to take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. The lengths that they’ll go to in order to argue for gun control are amazing, including inflating — or at least confusing — school shooting statistics.

On Monday, NPR claimed that the terrible shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, was the 27th school shooting of 2022 (this report insults the intelligence of listeners like you). But Robby Soave reports that the statistic doesn’t exactly tell the truth.

You may have seen the claim that Uvalde is the 27th (!) school shooting this year. This is misleading.

The other 26 were mostly incidents in parking lots or at sports games where one or zero people were shot. Still bad! But not *mass* casualty events.https://t.co/JfZExkkqaI

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) May 26, 2022

“For many people, the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting—which claimed the lives of at least 19 children and two adults—seemed all the more horrible after they learned it was the 27th school shooting so far this year,” Soave writes at Reason. “That fact makes it harder to view Uvalde as any kind of isolated incident.”

He points out that the reason for hyping such big numbers and making it sound like the loss of life in South Texas is the norm is mixing up three terms that the media conflates: school shooting, mass shooting, and mass school shooting. They do all sound similar, but there are distinctions. – READ MORE