Note to Media: Not All Gun-Related Incidents are Created Equal

A year ago today, there was a shooting at Antioch High School in Tennessee. The shooter entered the school cafeteria, killed one student, shot another, then turned the gun on himself.

If only he’d reversed the order, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

Since then, there have been questions about how the kid, who was just 17, got the gun. However, police are now looking for his mother as she’s in the wind and her DNA was found on the gun. Being a prohibited person is not helping.

However, the media in Tennessee has decided to make it like school gun incidents are super common in the Volunteer State, but they also accidentally showed why not everything should be lumped together.

 Thursday marks one year since a shooting at Antioch High School that left two students, including the 17-year-old gunman, dead.

In the months that followed, legislative attempts were made to help prevent future shootings; however, the data shows that there have been dozens of school-related gun incidents in the 12 months that have passed.

Data from the Gun Violence Archive shows that since the Antioch High School shooting on January 22, 2025, there have been at least 44 recorded school-related gun incidents across Tennessee. Across the state, Memphis had the highest number of incidents, 11, followed by Nashville, which had nine.

While there were dozens of situations, it is critical to note that there was just one victim death. That incident occurred on March 6, 2025, when 60-year-old Tipton County teacher Samuel Colin Day died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at Munford High School. His body was found early in the morning, before students arrived.

At least four people have been injured in the time frame of this data, all in a single incident in Chattanooga. The incident happened on July 12 last year during a large class reunion at a local community center.

So right here, we’ve got a suicide that happened well before any students were there for the day, and an incident that didn’t happen at a school and didn’t even involve a school activity off-campus. It was a class reunion, for crying out loud.

These aren’t remotely the same thing, other than involving a firearm, and to lump all of this into one basket as “school-related incidents” is stretching more than a little.

When people hear “school-related incidents” in relation to what happened at Antioch High, they’re automatically primed to think that most of those were similar incidents.

They’re not.

What happens all too often is that the media latches onto these numbers and incidents, tries to push a tenuous connection in hopes that people will be afraid and push for gun control, and pretends they’re just doing unbiased reporting.

Sure, this time they admit what two of those incidents were, but we also know that a lot of those incidents were also nothing like Antioch High.

How many cases were someone responding to a threat that was made, but was never going to be carried out? How many were some kid bringing his airsoft gun to school to show off to his friends? How many happened on campus after school hours?

And, based on this, how many actually had nothing to do with school at all except under the most tenuous interpretation someone can manage?

In order to have a reasonable discussion on the topic, we have to be clear about what we’re talking about. Lumping everything as “school-related incidents” when some didn’t even involve teachers, students, or school property just muddies the water and makes communication impossible.

The fact that I have no reason to believe those waters weren’t muddied deliberately just makes the whole thing more infuriating.

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

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