This spring, not long after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, the Department of Education released a report showing that during the 2015-2016 school year there were an astounding 240 school shootings. The figure has been repeated endlessly by gun control activists and commentators. The report from which it was derived, however, got little scrutiny. Almost nobody thought to ask why the number was so high.
Almost nobody—which is why National Public Radio deserves enormous credit for doing what other media organizations didn’t. After a few months of research—the government report is a massive document—what they found was pretty astounding. Of the 240 school shootings reported by the Department of Education, NPR was able to confirm that only 11 of them actually occurred.
The problem was bad methodology mixed with anti-gun ideology. The question asked of each one of the country’s 96,300 schools by the Department of Education was this: “Has there been at least one incident at your school that involved a shooting (regardless of whether anyone was hurt)?” The language is broad to the point of meaninglessness. “An incident that involved a shooting” could include any number of things—hearing what sounds like gunfire, rumors of a shooting, a “shooting” involving something other a gun, and so on. You may laugh, but the New York Times, as The Scrapbook recorded earlier this year, once included in its own compilation of “school shootings” a pellet shot at a school bus, shots supposedly fired at a community college without injury or suspect, and many other such non-events. Even if we take the report’s methodology semi-seriously, however, it means that during the 2015-16 school year, about 1 out of every 10,000 schools reported any kind of a “shooting.” In other words, shootings are extremely rare phenomena on America’s schoolyards and campuses.
Whatever methodology we settle on to determine the number of school shootings in the United States, perhaps we can all agree that an event should only be classified a “school shooting” if there was, in fact, a shooting.
