Please Stop Saying There Have Been 18 Mass Shootings Already in 2018

Look, It's a painful situation. There's death and family pain and suffering and there was a gun involved.

But facts matter. These numbers need no inflation. They're awful.

The Washington Post writes that these numbers matter because:

“gun-control activists use them as evidence in their fight for bans on assault weapons, stricter background checks... Gun rights groups seize on the faults in the data to undermine those arguments and, similarly, present skewed figures of their own.”I keep hearing there have been 18 school shootings this year already and I wonder if any one spouting it is aware of the following....

Of the "18" that you mysteriously haven't heard of all year...

1 was a student shooting himself which goes to my point about suicides and school itself being the problem.

Another was an adult who shot himself in a school parking lot. The guy was 31 and simply chose his old school's lot to do it. This also supports suggestion that our current school system is causing young people to choose death over life. Guy is out of school over a decade and goes back there to end his life. Calling this a "school shooting" is intellectually disingenuous and agenda-driven.

Next one was a corrections officer who misfired his gun in a school inside a school that was inside a jail. Calling this a school shooting is completely and totally dishonest.

In 10 of the 18 no one was injured, in 13 no one died.

Two in total were accidental discharges.

Doubt me, here you go

NY Daily News is not exactly in the NRAs corner, you know...

Same with Washington Post and CNBC and USA Today and PolitiFact which scores it as "Mostly False".

These numbers are put together by Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group, co-founded by Michael Bloomberg, which is clearly has an anti-gun agenda and is most famous for its running tally of school shootings.

From their website-

Between January 2009 and July 2015, there were at least 133 mass shootings in the U.S. Not all of them make headlines—and the story the data tells is different from the one that mass media would have you expect.

See? They even want you to believe this horrible thing happens every day or so, just not all of them make headlines. No, if this happened every day, the leftist media would have NO problem reporting on it consistently and we all know it.

Two things I have taken from this event:

1. The left will dishonor the fallen to get what they want as always.
2. Neither the right or the left want to actually talk about the real issue. Again in the last 10 years 288 people were killed in school shootings, this includes adults and the shooters themselves. In that same 10 years over 57,000 young people of school age committed suicide.

Its not a gun problem or a "mental illness" problem. We have had mental illness and guns for a long time but this problem is new. We have a system problem, a drugging our kids problem and a bullying problem.

Those are not so easy to put in a meme, insult the other side about or blame one individual or one thing on though, so it goes unspoken of? Those problems are hard, they require actual examination and plenty of blame to go around for all of society.

Jack Spirko over at The Survival Podcast has had a great running dialogue this week on his show. Definitely check him out and subscribe.