Thread by @AmySwearer

I'm going through 2022 school shooting data, and this is your friendly reminder that many gun control groups routinely inflate school shooting numbers to scare people into thinking Uvalde happens every week. It doesn't.

Here a few of my favorite inclusions from Everytown:

An adult couple met with strangers to buy a car in an elementary school parking lot at midnight. The sellers tried to rob them. One woman was shot in the shoulder and injured.

A 27-year-old man was found fatally shot in his car behind a school building on a Sunday.

A 20-year-old was found fatally shot behind a school building at 1:00 a.m.

Another man was fatally shot in a school parking lot at 6:40 am on a Sunday.

After a high school graduation ceremony, on publicly accessible tennis courts belonging to a local college, one teenager shot two other teenagers (one fatally) and fled.

A teenager shot another teenager on an elementary school's property on a Sunday.

There is literally one where an armed woman chased her ex-boyfriend out of the apartment, is confronted by officers near a daycare center and fatally shot...and the press release literally says the daycare center was not involved and was never in harm's way.

Are these all instances of gun violence? Yes. Are they all problematic in their own right? Yes. But packaging these as part of some "school shooting" epidemic is dishonest nonsense.

My God, they literally count a cop who shot himself in his own vehicle vaguely near an elementary school. Presumably overnight. In mid-JULY.

We've got a 25-year-old fatally shot [and I quote here] "near a school playground." On a Sunday evening.

A 17-year-old fatally shot outside of an elementary school...on Veteran's Day, when school wasn't in session.

It doesn't get less absurd. They include an instance where, after a night game for an adult league flag football league, a man fatally shot a member of the opposing team because of an on-field dispute...solely because it happened behind an elementary school.

Woof. I've discovered the "no one injured" filter and let me tell you, some of these are absolute doozies.

We've got an instance where a stray bullet struck a window of an elementary school while no one was inside the building.

We've got "a couple shots fired near a middle school baseball field on a Friday evening while a 20 year old and friends were taking batting practice," apparently not directed at anyone associated with the school, and as far as anyone can tell there were no injuries.

There are bullets hitting the outside wall of a middle school gym in the early morning before anyone was on the campus, likely during an unrelated drive-by shooting.

MORE adults in a flag football league getting into fights. No injuries this time, just a warning shot.

*Guys these examples are all just from the 2021-2022 school year numbers*

A bit tangential, but I'm also finding WAY more stories of school SROs protecting kids than I knew about previously. Like, did you know that in March, an SRO at a Woodbridge, VA, middle school confronted a man armed with a rifle and shotgun?

Woodbridge isn't that from me and I had no idea. The armed man threatened during a domestic dispute in a nearby home, then fired off a shotgun round on school property. Staff members rightly notified the SRO, who requested additional officers and locked down the school.

Once that was done, he confronted the armed man (outside of the school as he cut through property near the side of the school building) and arrested him.

Atlanta in March, an SRO shot and wounded a parent who showed up brandishing a gun at high school students and staff during school dismissal. She's been charged with a whole bathtub full of criminal offenses.

Just last month in Florida, an SRO fatally shot a man who drove through a high school breezeway while classes where in session, crashed his car into a tree, ran into the school auditorium, and fought with a staff member.

Everyone is over here whining about "but Everytown counts 'gunfire at schools' and not 'school shootings'" as though this is somehow now an honest framing of the issue. So let's do some other databases.

EducationWeek: edweek.org/leadership/sch…

Same problems of broadly tying in "things that happen near schools" with "school shootings."

4 teens get into a fight in a parking lot outside of a nighttime basketball game? Now a school shooting.

Same for an adult man shot in a parking lot during high school basketball game.

Student shot near a school AFTER the basketball game? Now a school shooting.

Student shot in a parking lot 45 minutes after school ended? Now a school shooting.

Interpersonal dispute after school in a parking lot? Now a school shooting.

On a basketball team's charter bus, after practice on the way to get dinner, a player's gun discharged inside his bag and struck a team trainer. This is now a school shooting.

A gang-related incident outside of a school stadium in a parking lot? Congrats. Now a school shooting.

Oh, look, CHDS calls anything a "shooting incident" using the same parameters as Everytown, so they can regurgitate some absurdly high numbers of "school shooting incidents" that tells us almost nothing about student safety but does manipulate people. chds.us/ssdb/charts-gr…

You really think gun control advocates don't use these absurd framings "prove" we need extreme gun control because students are perpetually in danger? Oh, look, Sandy Hook Promise using numbers from a database that replicates Everytown's parameters.

sandyhookpromise.org/blog/gun-viole…

So let me repeat: this isn't about justifying some "acceptable" number of school shootings or being fine with non-school violence. It's about groups intentionally manipulating people's perception of the problem so that they're more likely to side with an extreme policy approach.

Since so many people can't bother with basic contextual comprehension, I am very obviously referring to *favorite examples of intentional misrepresentation/manipulation in a specific data collection* this isn't hard unless you've come in bad faith.