Dishonest CNN claims 1.5 school shootings a week

The media bias and dishonesty is getting out of hand with the latest example coming from CNN. They claim 1.5 school shootings have taken place each week of 2018. For a station that claims facts matter, this claim is a disgrace.

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In an effort to help push gun control, and profit off of the fear of parents with kids in schools, Saeed Ahmed and Christina Walker had to completely redefine what we mean when we discuss school shootings. You see, they likely went into this wanting to tell you that school shootings are happening with unusually high frequency, and in order to create a set of facts that fit their narrative, they offered the following revision on how we should define school shootings:

The parameters CNN followed in this count are:

• A shooting that involved at least one person being shot (not including the shooter)
• A shooting that occurred on school grounds
• We included grades K through college/university level
• We included gang violence, fights, and domestic violence
• We included accidental discharge of a firearm as long as the first two parameters are met

This radical definition, based on “preliminary reports [that] may change” allows them to claim 1.5 shootings a week. It’s how they end up including in their list incidents that no reasonable – or honest – person would claim is a school shooting.

For example, they claim an incident at the University of South Alabama counts as a school shooting because a person was shot at the Grove Apartments (which is privately owned and operated) on the campus. Though CNN links to an article with sparse details, a WKRG-TV story reports no students were actually involved in the shooting.

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Another “school shooting” per Ahmed and Walker of CNN? Non-students using a college rec room, after school hours, where a gun was used. How about the “school shooting” that coincidentally took place at Central Michigan University where the victim and shooter weren’t students and the incident was domestic violence. In fact, many of the school shootings on this list involved victims and shooters who aren’t connected to the schools where the incidents took place.

Thankfully, school shootings are still remarkably rare. We’d love that number to be zero, and we should work on policies (new ones, strengthening pre-existing ones) that are constitutional and effective to get that number as low as possible, but let’s stop pushing fake data. The truth is that type of mass shootings that rightfully capture our attention represents about a fraction of a percent of gun violence in this country.

But CNN pretends 1.5 school shootings have occurred a week in 2018. This is journalism? This is CNN? This is dishonest.

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