There is little more heartbreaking than news of another school shooting. It would take a hard heart, indeed, to be unmoved by the images of the young children lost at Sandy Hook and Robb Elementary or the teens cut down at Columbine, Parkland, and Santa Fe High schools.
It takes a calculating cynic to lump those in with the casualties of gang activity, crime, and drive-by shootings to come up with a bigger number in a macabre sales pitch for what amounts to snake oil.
In short, it takes the gun control gang, which never lets a convenient crisis go to waste and never shies away from playing fast and loose with statistics.
David Codrea’s article “‘Study’ on School Shooters Really an Innuendo-Based Hit Piece on Gun Owners” highlights one of the results of gun control advocates’ mass deception. He presents with an “analysis” by Dr. Anne Nassauer, a professor of sociology at the University of Erfurt in Germany. Considering her virtually complete ignorance of the history of the American ‘gun culture’, past and present, the errors in her analysis aren’t surprising.
Roughly 49 million students are enrolled in more than 98,000 K-12 public schools in the U.S. The vast majority of school shootings are committed by students.
The K-12 School Shooting Database (K-12SSD) is the scholastic equivalent of the Gun Violence Archive’s tally of mass shootings. One of the key differences is the K-12 Database’s definition of a school shooting is even looser than the GVA’s version of a mass shooting.
Officially, the K-12SSD’s definition of a school shooting is “anytime a gun is fired or brandished with intent or when a bullet hits school property, regardless of victims, time, day, or reason.”
In practice, the working definition is not nearly so restrictive. Looking at the K-12SSD’s list of 341 school shootings over the 23 years from Columbine to Robb Elementary, incidents that even police said were not connected to a school were counted. So were accidental discharges of a school resource officers’ sidearm (though not a single incident involving an armed teacher or staff member), BB and pellet guns, bodies found on school grounds, a robbery at a fast-food restaurant across the street from a school, and an incident where a motorist was shot while driving and crashed into a school.
About 76% of school shootings did not involve any fatalities, and 31% had no casualties at all. Yet, when the public hears the term ‘school shooting,’ they think of mass shootings in schools, such as Sandy Hook or Parkland. There were just nine of those from 1999 to 2022, less than three percent of the incidents reported.
The majority of school shooting incidents are the result of “escalation of a dispute,” and most occur in school parking lots or on athletic fields.
Yet the media faithfully reports the K-12SSD’s numbers without any details or context. It’s part of the big numbers campaign centered around ‘gun violence’.
As always, the goal is to promote gun control laws and to create a public demand for them. This is important because, as usual, there’s no evidence gun control laws have any impact. More than 31% of the school shooting incidents on our list happened in states with restrictive gun laws.
Ironically, there were no incidents in West Virginia and Wyoming, and just one, an accident with a school resource officer’s gun, resulting in no injuries, in Montana, the state with the highest estimated rate of household gun ownership in the U.S.
But gun control has no shame. It’s either that or they are so far removed from reality that light hasn’t reached them yet. Perhaps it’s some sort of twisted survival trait: If the gun-grabbers actually looked at themselves, it might destroy them.
About Bill Cawthon
Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago and has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.
