I've been a Second Amendment activist for a long time.
How long? Don't be rude. A very long time.
And if you've been one, too, you've probably noticed over time that the gun control movement goes cranks out a lot of "science" - generally statistics - that seem pretty damning...
...but never, ever stand up to detailed scrutiny.
Fortunately, "detailed scrutiny" is something the Second Amendment movement is really good at.
In the wake of a rash of school shootings, the "gun safety" movement has latched onto some statistics that seem pretty damning on the surface - almost like they're designed to tug on the heartstrings:
A new research letter published [in 2020] in JAMA Pediatrics from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) shows that one in five mass shootings occurs within a block of a school and more than 90% occur within a mile of a school or place where children gather.
“Firearms are the second leading cause of trauma-related death in children in our Trauma Centers,” said Michael Nance, M.D. FACS, FAAP, Director of the Pediatric Trauma Program, investigator with the Center for Injury Prevention at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and lead author of the research letter. “Our findings highlight the sheer extent of the problem and show how closely mass shootings are tied to our communities, and especially to the places where children learn and play.”
Of course, it is designed to tug on the heartstrings.
When you see "studies" that talk about "mass shootings", you will almost invariably find a citation leading back to a database called the "Gun Violence Archive":
The Gun Violence Archive, or GVA, was founded in 2013 by Michael Klein, a left-leaning philanthropist and open-government advocate, and Mark Bryant, a retired computer analyst and GVA’s current executive director.
When you hear leftist politicians' claims that there've been hundreds of mass shootings in a year, the claim nearly always traces back to the GVA, or someone citing it.
So what's the problem?
According to Bryant’s all-inclusive definition, there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much narrower definition.
While the GVA collects and publishes several different types of shooting data – mass murders, number of children and teens killed or injured, officer-involved shootings, defenses gun usages and more – it is their inflated mass shooting numbers that are cited most often by the mainstream media, given its penchant for sensational headlines.
In an interview with the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project on Tuesday, Bryant defended his broader definition and the higher body count it yields. “It doesn’t parse,” he said. “It gives an accurate picture of the number of times more than four people were shot, whether in a drive-by or a shooting at a rap concert or a country music concert.”
If his higher numbers are misleading the public or being misinterpreted by journalists, it’s not his fault, Bryant claimed. He believes his numbers are fair. “I do, but I think it’s also up to the journalist and the reader to have a better understanding of what the data says. When a journalist uses the mass-shooting numbers as their lead, they’re not looking at the whole situation.”
There have literally been justifiable, self-defense shootings, not to mention countless gangland drive-by shootings, botched robberies, and murder/suicides lumped in and on top of the much, much smaller group of spree killings carried out by people whose sole motive is to earn infamy by murdering as many people as they can.
When you learn that, you learn that this argument is a completely dishonest misdirection intended to play on the emotions of the gullible - especially with regard to child victims.
When a person with a living soul hears about children being murdered, the emotions get another twist. Nothing makes a good human angrier than children being murdered.
And you have to figure the people behind the GVA, and the people using their data, know this.
Probem is, their definition of "child" includes anyone below age 18 killed by a gun, without regard to what they were doing. Including juveniles involved in, or impacted by, criminal gang activity - which is the vast majority of the "children" in the GVA database.
And when people intone things like "most mass shootings happen within a mile of where children learn and play"? It's true - because most of the database's mass shootings are related to crime, and crime happens where people are, and people have neighborhoods, and schools, often within a mile of miscreants that are miscreanting.
Now, the GVA couches this misrepresentation as being "non-prejudicial" in its collection and presentation of data.
There's a pretty solid case that it's more intended to emotionally logroll the logrollable:
In my humble opinion, Bryant is clearly trying to have things both ways. On one hand he claims he wants his data to be clear, accurate and not misinterpreted. On the other hand, the data itself is neither clear nor accurate, and it’s so sensational – 417 mass shooting versus the FBI’s 30 for 2019 – that of course the media and gun-control organizations are going to use it and misinterpret it. It fits their “guns are evil” narrative far better than the FBI statistics. And once the mainstream media accepts Bryant’s definition and its much higher numbers, they’re hooked. There’s no going back to the FBI’s data. After all, how would they explain to their viewers that the numbers have declined by 10-fold.
I also believe Bryant was somewhat less than candid about the public’s perception of a mass shooting. He knows full well what most Americans believe constitutes a mass shooting, and it’s not a couple of gangsters shooting it out over turf, a drug deal gone bad or a psycho who shoots his own family.
Inflating "mass murder" figures by over an order of magnitude using data that has nothing to do with the pathology of mass murder for its own sake - can we all agree that's dishonest?
