Cooke: Lying About School Shootings

Charles C. W. Cooke has a must-read piece at NRO on Team Bloomberg's absolutely fraudulent claim that there have been 74 school shootings since Newtown.

The Post is admirably clear that the map includes both colleges and schools, that it counts “any instance in which a firearm was discharged within a school building or on school grounds,” and that the data isn’t “limited to mass shootings like Newtown.” This point has also been made forcefully by Charles C. Johnson, who yesterday looked into each of the 74 incidents and noted that not only did some of them not take place on campuses, but that “fewer than 7 of the 74 school shootings listed by #Everytown are mass shootings,” that one or more probably didn’t happen at all, and that 32 could be classified as “school shootings” only if we are to twist the meaning of the term beyond all recognition.

And that, of course, is precisely what the map’s creator is doing. The point here is not to tell the truth, but to get out the “74 school shootings since Newtown” figure and to turn it into conventional wisdom before anybody can check if its actually correct.

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And as Cooke further points out, Everytown isn't the only one engaged in this:

Everytown is not the only advocate of gun control that is engaged in a concerted effort to convince the public that gun violence is on the rise. At his White House event yesterday, President Obama insinuated that the United States was uncommonly awash with shootings. “We’re the only developed country on Earth where this happens,” he said.

And it happens now once a week. And it’s a one-day story. There’s no place else like this.

Later, the president added:

So the country has to do some soul-searching about this. This is becoming the norm.

This isn’t true. But it doesn’t matter.

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This is, of course, the White House's "stray voltage" plan in action.

Be sure to read Cooke's piece, arm yourself with the facts and attack this idiocy wherever it pops up.

posted by Andy at 12:50 PM

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