Media’s school shooting paranoia promotes false narrative

The tragic Uvalde, Texas shooting at an elementary school led to days of mourning, as well as immediate calls from the Left, mainstream media, and academics to revoke the protections of gun rights under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Robby Soave at Reason debunked the left-wing, mainstream media narratives about school shootings. Much has been made from the NPR article about 27 school shootings that took place this year, but Soave correctly pointed out that the article conflated the phrases “school shooting,” “mass shooting,” and “mass school shooting.”

Instead, the data shows that there were 13 mass school shootings in the past 56 years, instead of the false media narrative that there were 27 school shootings in 2022 alone. Soave pointed out that school shootings, as defined by Education Week, occur when “a person other than the suspect suffers a bullet wound on school property.” The majority of the 26 school shootings were due to parking lot disputes between students or post-athletic event disputes and each of those shootings resulted in either one or zero deaths.

The tragic Uvalde mass school shooting, where 19 children and 2 adults died, is a rare occurrence. Research done by the Scientific American claimed that, since 1966, there have been 13 mass school shooting events that have claimed at least 4 deaths of persons other than the suspect. Indeed, 146 people died in these 13 mass school shooting events.

Soave wrote that mass casualty shootings make up less than 1 percent of all gun-related deaths, while suicides and non-mass casualty shootings make up the majority of gun-related crimes.

The mainstream media has been consistently wrong about gun-related crimes and mass school shootings. The public deserves accurate reporting without the politically-tinged paranoia when it comes to this sensitive subject.

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