One of the lessons I learned in journalism school at the University of North Carolina was that when you deal with press releases, you usually have to wade through a lot of fluff to find the story. Well, yesterday revealed one of the rare instances where a story is less believable than the press release on which it’s based.
Late Tuesday, Everytown for Gun Safety made an announcement that should have sent a chill down the nation’s collective spine–the shooting at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon was the 74th school shooting since Sandy Hook. That figure was quoted more or less verbatim across the mainstream news media–until yesterday, when CNN announced that based on its own review of Everytown’s data, there were actually only 15 school shootings between Sandy Hook and Troutdale. That figure is eye-popping by itself–roughly one shooting every five weeks. However, CNN’s explanation for excluding 59 of the school shootings on Everytown’s list–more than 81 percent of the total–doesn’t add up.
According to CNN, the 15 shootings on its list were almost identical to Sandy Hook and Troutdale in nature–“a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school.” CNN dismissed the other incidents as “personal arguments, accidents and alleged gang activities and drug deals” that happened to involve gunplay. There are two problems with this. One is that Everytown’s definition of a “school shooting” is as straightforward as you can get:
“Incidents were classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds, as documented in publicly reported news accounts. This includes assaults, homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings.“
The other is that no fewer than four shootings on Everytown’s list were previously reported by CNN as “school shootings,” as Everytown pointed out in its response to CNN. Among them were a 2013 shooting at Lone Star (community) College in Houston, as well as a shooting at a Florida community college this past January. Notably, one of the shootings on CNN’s list–the Santa Barbara shooting–doesn’t make Everytown’s list because it didn’t take place on campus. And Everytown thinks that its estimate may be on the low side, since it relied on published reports of shootings.
According to Media Matters, this change of heart by CNN appears to have come after a lot of prodding from the right. Hours after Everytown released its list, conservative journalist and Daily Caller contributor Charles Johnson fired off a raft of tweets claiming that many of the shootings on the list weren’t actual school shootings. His logic?
“It’s not a school shooting when someone goes and shoots a specific person on campus. It’s a shooting that happens to take place at school.”
Those tweets were quickly picked up by The Blaze, and other right-wing outlets chimed in. Rather than present Everytown’s data in a straightforward manner (see Yahoo News and The Washington Post for good examples), CNN folded like a green poker player. Even that didn’t go far enough for Johnson, who claims that there have been only seven school shootings since Sandy Hook. When The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman got wind of Johnson’s Twitter campaign, he summed up its lunacy this way:
“(T)he message to parents concerned that there are loaded weapons going off on school property, and that their sons and daughters are at risk of being hit by bullets from those weapons, is this: it doesn’t really count unless the shooter is a pupil, not involved in a gang, who made a pre-meditated plan to massacre a large number of students. And not in the parking lot.”
The right essentially lynched Bill Clinton over his definition of “what ‘is’ is.” And yet, right-wingers managed to browbeat CNN into accepting their disingenuous and potentially dangerous hair-splitting on the definition of a school shooting–and expect us to accept it as well. The mind reels.
Edited/Published by: SB
Darrell Lucus is a radical lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
