When it comes to tallying the number of shootings, left-leaning and mainstream publications often go to great lengths to paint a false picture.
On Tuesday, a 15-year-old boy opened fire on his schoolmates before class at Marshall County High School in Benton, Ky., killing two and wounding 17 others. It’s a tragic event that’s shocking in every sense. But the media has made a brazen attempt to characterize the mass shooting that we saw in Kentucky as similar to 10 other shooting incidents that took place on campuses throughout the country. The New York Times ran the headline, “School Shooting in Kentucky Was Nation’s 11th of Year. It Was Jan. 23.” NPR also attempted to paint a similar picture that these type of mass shootings just happen all the time.
Of all the outlets that went with this narrative, HuffPost may actually have been the most honest and accurate by running a headline, “U.S. Schools Have Already Faced 11 Shooting Incidents This Year,” and then listing each shooting incident that happened around the country.
The dispute is not over whether there were actually 11 different instances in which a gun was discharged or whether people were harmed or killed as a result. The dispute is over the context of these particular shootings, because conflating the mass shooting in Kentucky with 10 other shootings misleads people to think that mass school shootings are happening every two to three days.
Of the 10 other school shootings, four of them were homicides or attempted homicides. Two were suicides — one in an elementary school bathroom in Arizona and another in an elementary school parking lot in Michigan, when the school was closed and there were no children present. Two involved random instances of guns being shot at school buildings (one at a high school near Seattle, Wash., and another in San Bernardino, Calif., at the local Cal State University campus where, in both cases, no one could confirm if there was a shooter or where the bullets came from). One was the case of a student who confused a real gun with a training gun and as a result accidentally fired into a wall. Finally, one involved a man shooting a pellet gun at a school bus in Iowa.
The cases that seem most related would be the four homicides and attempted homicides. But even of these, one took place in a college parking lot, where gunfire was exchanged between two vehicles with no reported injuries or deaths. In North Carolina, a Winston-Salem State University football player was shot and killed following an argument at a sorority party — which while tragic is quite different from a shooting at a school. A third case was at least an apparent shooting that occurred at a school — a drive-by shooting in a school parking lot, in which one student was injured although not by a bullet. The evidence in that case suggests at least one of the students in the group targeted may have also been firing a gun.
Finally, there’s the one case unambiguously similar to that in Kentucky: In Texas, a 16-year-old boy who has been a known discipline problem at his school shot a 15-year-old girl twice in a school cafeteria, seriously wounding her (she’s expected to survive).
Again, these are all shocking and horrific events, but it’s even more important to look at the facts about each incident. Grouping them under a misleading label like “school shootings” only diminishes the pain and anguish that the victims and their families are going through. All this does is reinforce people’s stereotypes about guns and how they should be banned altogether, rather than teaching proper gun safety and heeding the warning signs of individuals who may want to inflict mass casualties on their peers. It’s a toxic narrative to play up in an already extremely polarized society.
Siraj Hashmi is a commentary video editor and writer for the Washington Examiner.
