Report on School Shootings Full of Misinformation

Not that long ago, a lot of people in the government were talking about cracking down on misinformation. They wanted to ban people saying certain things, and even worked with Twitter to get people banned, posts deleted, and a host of other things that the government never should have done. Especially since it turned out that a lot of the “misinformation” in question turned out to be true.

Yet I couldn’t help but think about that when I came across a story about school shootings.

See, it’s one thing to talk about school shootings and the potential dangers of them, but it’s quite another to present things as fact that simply aren’t true, which is what one local news station did. The piece is titled, “Two Shootings a Day: The Grim Reality Facing U.S. Schools in 2025,” and let’s get into the ways this is predicated on nothing but BS.

The Uvalde School Shooting was just one of the 644 mass shootings recorded by the Gun Violence Archive in 2022. The database defines a mass shooting as an incident where four or more victims are shot or killed, not including the shooter. This sobering figure, which amounts to nearly two mass shootings each day, reflects a grim reality since 2020 – the number of mass shootings in the U.S. consistently exceeds the number of days in the year.

According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, there has been a sharp rise in the number of mass casualty incidents at schools in America since Sandy Hook in 2012, with 2023 becoming the deadliest year ever. A staggering 349 school shootings were reported nationwide. “There are only 180 school days. So, we’re looking at two shootings a day. Just about every day,” said Monty Clark, the CEO of a Florida company that makes personal body armor for children. “We’ve got to do something about this.”

Despite the increasing death toll and growing fear among students, teachers, and parents, meaningful legislative action remains hard to achieve. Gun control debates continue to divide Congress, with efforts to ban assault weapons or implement universal background checks often stalling due to partisan deadlock.

This piece starts with talking about Uvalde, which is how a lot of these pieces start. They take a major mass murder, then frame it as just another day, while giving you some numbers that many might believe show that Uvalde was nothing exceptional.

That’s not remotely true.

First, they use the average presented by the Gun Violence Archive for “mass shootings,” but GVA uses a different definition from pretty much every other database out there, which counts people shot, not people killed in an incident. This inflates the total significantly and doesn’t really meet what most people think of as a mass shooting in many cases.

While I might be open to the idea of counting injuries, one should make sure it’s exclusive of any other criminal activity, including gang participation, because most of these “mass shootings” are just that.

Still, even if we accept the numbers at face value, that’s where the whole “two shootings per day” thing comes from. That has nothing at all to do with schools, but society as a whole.

If I stopped examining things right there, that would probably be enough to show the misinformation rampant in this so-called news piece, but it’s not.

For school shootings, they cite the K-12 School Shooting Database, and boy, is that a trainwreck.

See, I looked over there. I know there are serious problems with their methodology, but that seemed like a ridiculously high number of multiple-casualty shootings, and I was curious to see if I could get where the database got its numbers.

It turns out, there’s no such data in existence. There were a total of 349 “shootings” on school campuses in 2023, according to the site, but there’s no collection of shootings with multiple victims present. These are raw totals, which is a big problem here because the K-12 School Shooting Database is notorious for including any kind of shooting that happens to take place on a school campus, including incidents that happen when school isn’t even in session.

In other words, for all the fearmongering over school shootings, there’s nowhere near the number of actual school shootings presented here, especially injuring multiple students or staff. There’s no two shootings per day average for school shootings. There’s nothing they’re trying to present here as justification for everything that comes after.

This is classic misinformation.

I can’t help but think, though, that if the Biden administration had gotten its way on misinformation, this would have passed their internal sniff test while my debunking above wouldn’t have. It’s a good thing they never got their way, though, because it means I can use my freedom of speech and our freedom of the press to slap down this nonsense.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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