Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action for Civilian Disarmament (courtesy YouTube.com)

Earlier we reported on the list of 74 purported “school shooting” incidents published by Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety, and how one journalist was able to show with a few quick Google searches that the vast majority of these incidents failed to fit even the loosest commonly accepted definition of “school shootings.” My estimate was that about seven were true “spree killer” style school shootings, and it looks like CNN has been double-checking the math as well. Out of seventy-four claimed by EGS, the network was only able to validate 15 . . .

From CNN:

CNN determined that 15 of the incidents Everytown included were situations similar to the violence in Oregon — a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school. That works out to about one shooting every five weeks.

CNN lists these events and even a cursory glance reveals that they’ve been generous in their own assessment. There are multiple instances in their pared-down compilation where the school was not the target, and was only tangentially involved.

It’s sad that there are still even that many shooting incidents, but there are two huge takeaways from this article:

1) Bloomberg and his Flacks Need to Lie to Maintain the Appearance of Relevance

Facts. Statistics. Logic. These are the cornerstones of intelligent debate, and have never really been on the radar for gun control groups. Banning guns is a business of pure emotion, and the only reason they include even the massaged statistics they do is to give the trappings of proper scientific vetting.

Every time Bloomberg or one of his employees publishes something like this trumped up tally, in the end it only really re-enforces the notion that the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex couldn’t give a fig about the truth. And it isn’t bringing anyone over to their side.

2) The Mainstream Media Isn’t Buying It

If this were 2012, CNN and the rest of the MSM would have been uncritically boosting Everytown and their dubious map of school shootings. This time around, though, only the most rabidly anti-gun and partisan media outlets ran with the story before checking the facts. Mother Jones, Huffington Post and a few others regurgitated the list as if it were gospel, but it didn’t make as big a splash as expected. Sure there was the usual “viral” spread through the already anti-gun minority. But by the time it got to CNN, the story was no longer about the list — it was about how it had been debunked with a resultant scramble to save what little credibility remained.

Stories like these don’t help the gun control extremists’ cause. This takedown by isn’t exactly an open endorsement of the NRA, but when even CNN can’t back up your claims, you know you’re in trouble.

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74 COMMENTS

    • You know this article was debunked right?

      You really think “Truth About Guns” sounds is going to give an unbiased story towards guns.

      LOL guns kill…what’s the argument….Many people have them so many people kill. Less people who have them less people will kill.

      The percentage of people who kill with a gun to ownership Is much larger than it is via any other item/ownership.

      It’s not mass #’s it’s percentage to keep statistics in check.

      Reminds me when people say “more people die from Tylenol per year then heroin” ughh yeah but if the same # of people who use Tylenol also used heroin, heroin clearly would claim more lives.

      • 1) Learn to spell properly.
        2) “Many people have/kill, less people have/kill” is a logical fallacy.
        3) Get you facts straight regarding killings-to-ownership ratio.
        4) Provide a link to the “percentages” that you are using.

      • Guns kill. Sure. So do cars. And swimming pools. They kill far, far, far more people than guns. What’s your point?

        A person owning a gun is more likely to kill? Are you talking about legally owned guns or illegally owned guns in the hands of gang-bangers? Regardless, it’s irrelevant. A person who owns kitchen knives is statistically more likely to kill using a kitchen knife. But if you want to adopt a policy of banning something entirely because of a correlation with killing, well, go ahead and strip naked because people have been known to fashion nooses and hang themselves using their own clothing.

      • 99.95% of all civilian-owned guns are never used illegally, so your statement makes no sense.

        Why is it that when the most recent nut goes on a killing rampage, he kills 3 people with a knife, 3 people with a gun, and when the lame-stream media writes their articles about him, they call him a gunman, not a knifeman? In fact, when anyone is killed by a knife, have you ever heard the killer called a knifeman??

      • I don’t usually like commenting on public forums, but nothing “irks” me more than rhetoric without the facts to back it up. Gun ownership is higher than ever, yet the per capita murder rate (murders per 100,000) has been cut in half since 1991. In 1991 (the highest year going back to 1960), 9.8 murders per 100,000 people were committed in the US. Compare that with 2012 (2013 stats won’t be published by the FBI until the fall) where it was down to 4.7 per 100,000 people. The interesting thing is that the gun industry is “booming” and the reported population (according to the US Census Bureau) has gone from 252,153,092 in 1991 to 314,395,013 (from NBC news 12/10/12) in 2012.

        As a matter of a fact, if you look at crime stats across the board over that same period, the general crime rate has been cut in half in the United States! This includes violent crimes such as forcible sex assaults, robberies, etc. If necessary, I can provide sourcing links for everything that I’ve listed. All of these facts are with gun ownership at an all-time high, and more CCW’s than ever before.

        Now with vehicles, with all of the safety advancements, we’ve only reduced the number of roadway fatalities by about ⅓ since 1991 (16.461/100,000 to 10.8399/100,000 in 2012). Why aren’t you clambering for assault vehicle control and better regulation of vehicle permits? If 3-4x the number of people die annually by vehicles, we need to get these evil things out of the hands of the population.

        It is a well known fact that it only takes approximately 50 HP to get a family-sized vehicle to highway speed. Permits and tax stamps should be required for all vehicles over 50 HP. Automatic transmissions should be restricted to law enforcement only. High capacity fuel tanks (permit long chase times) should be restricted to 10 gallons or less (7 in NY).

        Most gun arguments I hear from people are emotional-based with no factual basis. If you want to use those arguments, we need to apply it to all other areas of life. More people die from household accidents, vehicle crashes, etc. than by firearms. Let’s tackle those high-death areas first than just deal with the easy emotional issues. It’s interesting everybody wants high capacity magazine bans when the majority of criminal encounters involve less than three shots.

        In case you are wondering my background, I spent most of the last decade in law enforcement. When I started, it was a few years before the sunset of the Clinton AWB of 1994. The hoops I had to go through to get my “high capacity” 13 round magazines ordered for my Glock 21 duty weapon. I owned other guns at the time, but chose the 21 for the academy for the reliability, etc. Plus, I didn’t want to scratch up a $1,500+ 1911 on patrol. At the time, I had to submit on official letterhead a request to purchase the magazines, the magazines had to be ordered, and I waited 10 months for them to arrive. Glock was experiencing a shortage, and even though I had purchased one of their “blue” labeled model guns, it had included 3 10-rounders. I’ve found these laws only hurt the good people, not the bad people. I spent my first few months on patrol with my underloaded “civilian friendly” magazines. Other people in my academy had the same problem. It was really ridiculous for the 9mm shooters that had to cut their capacity by ⅓ or more for their first year.

        So, if you want to continue to debate this, please feel free to do so. Just be forewarned that you will be bombarded with actual legitimate facts and statistics (with proper sourcing).

        • Ahhhh! Now I understand the reasoning behind the President’s desire to release thousands of convicted felons from prison. He needs to get the crime rate up quick to bolster his anti-gun agenda. Crime went down and the prisons are over crowded, so if you empty the prisons?

      • Ummm, DannyBoy; beyond the very good rebuttals to your post; I would add that your posting is practically unreadable due the poor sentence structure, incomplete thought formation and use of txt speech.

        If you want to have a better response to postings in the future; I would suggest a semester or two of English Composition.

        • +1000 ; I had to apply some serious brain power to even understand that grammatical train wreck, to say nothing of the packaged statist groupthink DannyBoy was trying to pass as facts.

      • “The percentage of people who kill with a gun to ownership Is much larger than it is via any other item/ownership”

        Actually this is not true. Legal gun owners actually have a LOWER homicide, intentional and non intentional, commission rate than the general public mean commission rate.

        You do realize that unlike the general public virtually all gun owners have ben checked and have not committed crimes, right?

        I suggest you do some research

        • I love how anti-gunners come to a pro-gun site to post some emotionally based BS and then get ripped to shreds by facts and logic. It’s so bad they never respond. Yet look what happens when a pro gun person post on one if the liberal rag sites. They get attacked with threats and called all sorts of names. The other side is so pathetic yet they claim to be the ones who care and are reasonable and we are the bigots…..

          I hate progressives and deep down I kind of hope a revolution happens one day and they pay the ultimate price for what they are attempting to turn this country into with political correctness, social justice, the fraud of global warming, illegal immigration, and gun control.

      • Yes…. people use guns if they plan on killing.

        Your comment is foolish and misguided, and shows your inability to grasp even basic concepts. Please, go sit at the children’s table if you can’t bring anything better than this to a rational debate.

        What you have spewed is akin to saying “people with hammers drive more nails”.

        Stop trolling here. You wont change any minds.

  2. What’s this CNN you refer to? I know there’s a cable news channel that goes by that name, but the responsible journalism you’re describing here is nothing like the work that goes on there, so I figure it must be some other organization that happens to have the same initials…

    • The same CNN that ran a bogus report about what would happen if the Clinton AWB was allowed to expire a few years ago. They destroyed some cinder blocks with a full-auto rifle to “demonstrate” the kind of firepower that would be unleashed without the ban (which of course applied to semiautos only)–and for comparison fired another rifle but aimed it away from the blocks the camera was on. Wayne LaPierre called them out on it the next Sunday on their own network. Frankly I’m stunned at this report .

    • In the past couple of months I am finding that the reporters for the CNN website have actually been journalists! They have been fair in their reports, showing much less signs of bias that the new channel does and have been writing stories that the other mainstream new organizations have neglected. Yes, I was shocked, but that’s good.

    • CNN has finally figured out what the majority wants. They have realized the the anti-gun Utopia the Progressives (it’s progressive, like a disease) isn’t going to happen. Socialist hold out states, like California and New York are going against what the general public wants. And the Majority of America is Pro Gun. The failure of the Obama administration to pass any legislation at all on the federal level in the wake of Sandy Hook has made that abundantly clear.

      CNN is a business, and in spite of the hoary old liberals at the top of the organization, they have realized that in a country that is majority pro gun, they’ll have to be at least fair and balanced or they’ll start shedding viewers. I mean, more than they have been.

  3. The story and the silly little map were on the front page of Yahoo! yesterday too. I think Yahoo! gives Mother Jones a run for their money sometimes with some issues.

    • what I don’t understand is how Yahoo stories consistently get 15,000 or 30,000 comments. that’s just crazy. most are completely unintelligible.

      • I’m more surprised that people still use Yahoo. I thought it faded into obscurity in the dot com bubble of the 90’s along with Excite and AltaVista

        • I use Yahoo a lot. But the “news” part does indeed kind of look like, well, People Magazine.

      • It’s quite simple Jeff, most of humanity is completely unintelligible.
        Watching many people trying to debate an issue is like watching sheep graze. The glazed over eyes, the aimless wondering, all within the fence the the shepherd has erected for them.

  4. When you consistently throw away your credibility as a news source, you get replaced by by other sources, and your ratings drop. When your ratings drop, advertisers look elsewhere.
    I am going to start writing to CNN advertisers directly.
    “Since CNN is willing to propagate lies to further their civilian-disarmament agenda, I can only assume you chose them as an outlet to lie about your product/service. A trustworthy merchant would use a trustworthy venue.”

      • Partially. I was just thinking that if they’re willing to break ranks, even slightly, with the statist mantra, we might use a little economic pressure to push them toward the center-left, or if we’re really lucky, the center-center.

        • Careful, when you use language like “propagate lies to further their civilian-disarmament agenda” you are on the same page as everyone here, but sound pretty nutty and paranoid to others who might not know the background or exactly what you mean.

  5. You know you’re in trouble credibility wise when you’re out fact checked by CNN.

  6. “…but when even CNN can’t back up your claims, you know you’re in trouble.”

    …but when even CNN WON’T back up your claims, you know you’re in trouble.

    FIFY

  7. This is fun and all but what really matters here is if anyone actually cares. Of all the MSM outlets who have been parading this nonsense around the past couple of days how many will bother to correct the story? How many will do so with any prominence? Of their audiences how many will bother to read or understand any context or correction?

    This is one of those things that will forever live on as fact for who wants it to be fact and will forever be a joke for anyone who is paying attention.

    There are still people who believe the whole Black Talon crap, who honestly fear shoulder things that go up, who believe 40% of all firearms transactions are to felons at gun shows, who think if they sailed a ship to the edge of the earth they’d fall off.

    15 years from now some moron is going to cite this 74 shootings nonsense as more factual than a heliocentric solar system.

    • You’ll recall that a valid MH-370 disappearance theory at one point was that it flew into a time vortex and would reappear in the future. You can’t make this stuff up; people will believe anything.

  9. If you ever get the US Treasury Department to issue you a permit to travel to Cuba, or you travel with a medical missionary team (my choice), you will find the only English TV channel you can access is CNN. When communist officials are asked why just this channel, they respond as if you should already know this: “It is the only news the government trusts!” “Nuff said!

    • Wow, even more amazement :-0 ! And you can see that Politifact is doing it’s best to give Shannon the benefit of the doubt, where any exists.

  12. Everytown for Gun Control must be a lonely place for the Hysterical Mother. Making things up can’t be very much fun if no one believes you. Come November, liberal tears will fall like rain and the Strident Hysteric will become a Despondent Hysteric.

  16. I would not say that the MSM is not buying it since an article in the USA Today posted yesterday deftly quoted the 74 school shootings.

  17. You will notice, however, that they specifically go out of their way in that article not to mention the baselessness of the other 59 gun-related incidents or speculate why only 15 of the 74 ‘school shootings’ reported by EGS meet the commonly accepted definition of ‘school shooting.’

  18. I read the article, and even some of those 15 are questionable. I would definitely exclude #14 – the Isla Vista shooting: 3 stabbed at his apartment, one shot at a deli, two shot outside a sorority house – none on school grounds.

    Then there’s #5- the Santa Barbara College shooting, where 3 of the four murder victims were not on school grounds.

    When you add it all up I count 6 murder victims at schools out of the 15 “validated” incidents.

  19. “Gun Control group lies about violence and use of guns.”

    “Earth rotates while orbiting sun, leading to day and night cycles.”

    Duh.

  20. I believe this quote applies to MDA :

    “Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.”
    —Jean Anouilh, L’Alouette, 1952

  21. Now POTG need to go to the CNN article and any other related articles online to bump the visit count and get it visible on count generated aggregators like Google News.

  22. The mainstream media’s love affair with the Obama Regime is over hence their love affair with his lackeys.

    or

    They finally figured out they were patsies and are dropping his word for more factual data in hopes of gaining all those they have lost.

  23. Move the wheel on the truth barge…takes awhile to change direction. IT IS TURNING. Thanks to you all, each having a turn at the wheel. NOW bring into port and VOTE

    Best Regards.

  25. Since MDA, MAIG, ETFGS, (how many subsidiaries of Bloombergs campaign is there!) seems to like spreading twitter length declarations of fact, here’s a couple:
    1) doing the math (74 / 15 * 100%=493%, or 500%) that’s “Bloomberg exaggerates school shootings by 500%”. Heck, not even “as seen on TV” infomercials exaggerate that much!
    2) or ” Bloombergs claim on school shootings: same group that claimed Boston marathon bomber was a victim of gun violence”

    • and your first example would be just as sloppy as theirs. Intentional parody? (They are exaggerating by 393 (almost 400) percent, the first 100 percent is not part of the inflated number.)

  26. The video that auto plays in the cnn link stated there were 15 school shootings in 2013 while the text shows 9, wanna bet how many people who visit this page don’t scroll down?

  27. Why is it that when a student shoots another student because there’s a beef between them, that it’s not called a “workplace shooting”??

    A school shooting is when one or more nuts invade a school to kill everything and anything in the school.

    • Because he wasn’t a homegrown Jihadist in the U.S. Army who screamed Allah Ackbar while gunning down fellow soldiers coming back/deploying to Iraq. Than it’s called workplace violence so that the survivors have a hard time seeking necessary medical help.

  28. Curious, what happens when you post the CNN link on Everytown or MDA’s facebook page?

    i.e. how long does the link stay before being deleted, do you get banned, etc?

    It would be interesting to do this and record the experience with screenshots as an experiment to demonstrate how vehemently anti-truth they are.

    • Surprisingly the Everytown FB page hasn’t been banning people, there are a lot of pro-gun people who post there and refute their propaganda. We all get attacked by the sheep but for the most myself and others who are against their group have been civil, intelligent and logical in our posts. Quite the opposite of most of the Everytown supporters.

      On the Moms page? You’d get deleted and banned within minutes.

  29. So will CNN now take whatever this group says with a grain of salt, instead of just parroting their propaganda, as they usually do?

    And I’d sure love someone to do a comparison as to how many drunk driving and alcohol-related deaths occurred in the same time frame. Put this in a little perspective….

    • Don’t give ’em any ideas. They tried banning booze once, and it didn’t work. Let’s not get that ball rolling again.

  30. How about pushing this agenda – REQUIRE all teachers, admin staff to attend a firearms training and safety seminar. Instead of ‘Gun Free Zone’ posted outside the schools, the sign would read, ‘ WARNING – ALL teachers and staff have been trained in the use of firearms. ALL have gun permits and concealed carry permits. ALL have sworn to protect our children as necessary. ‘

    I know this would cause an uproar, but there are several small towns, cities where all households are required to have a gun, with permit. There is not 100% compliance, but in general, police do not enforce these laws. Criminals are left guessing which house is safe to invade… guess what? The criminals go somewhere else.

    So, no teacher would actually have to ‘get a gun’ – just get the training – the permits are optional – let the psycho’s roll the dice, instead of having a red carpet to commit mayhem. That 15 number above might be a lot closer to zero.

  31. Irony Alert:

    This morning the NYDN had two of their usual rabid anti-gun “articles” ([ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/school-shooter-portland-ore-ar-15-report-article-1.1825533 ] and [ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/gun-violence-affected-article-1.1826379 ]) posted right above ‘SHE WAS A HUMAN SHIELD’: Dad fatally shoots thug, wounds another after finding daughter held at gunpoint inside home [ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/st-louis-father-mother-open-fire-2-men-holding-daughter-gunpoint-attempted-robbery-article-1.1826739 ]

  32. I just read this article on CNN and I’m very impressed with the coverage. Moms and Bloomberg made a real mistake trying to exaggerate this one so much. It is frankly a lie and even CNN is calling them on it! Also, last night Anderson Cooper (who I generally despise) did an interview with the family of Joesph Wilcox in Las Vegas. He was the ccw bystander killed trying to stop the cop killers……surprisingly he was very humble and indicated that Mr. Wilcox was clearly a hero for trying. Folks, when CNN starts to report this way it is possible we just may have won this debate. I was greatful atleast that a guy like Anderson Cooper would hail Wilcox as a good guy & hero who did the right thing. Is this guy really pro-2A? Could it be possible!!!

  33. Of course 7 or 15 is far too many school shootings. Why are we the only ones that seem to understand how to stop them?

  34. The President has taken up the “One a Week” talking point.

    Now the Press is going to have to choose. Do they cover for “their guy”, or do they report the obvious truth? The only reason CNN committed journalism in this isolated case is because the President had not yet staked out the “One a Week” position.

  35. Que cantidad de gente tonta
    Por favor…quieren ver lo que quieren ver…asi esta este pais… Cada vez mas ignorante…

  36. anyone else think that “woman” wears too much make-up?? Her eyes especially. Well, go ahead, put on some more, it’s not like you can make yourself look any more like a whore.

  39. I heard the 74 shooting number spit out from KGW tv channel 8 in Portland Oregon during their newscasts.
    I think CNN has burned themselves on some reports in the past, they must be trying to vet their facts better, before they broadcast a story.

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