Real Data on School Shootings
What does the Gun Violence Archive's data on school shootings reveal?
Why does the United States have so many school shootings? Creative counting, mostly. Click/Tap the video with more info:
The Gun Violence Archive is an online archive of gun violence incidents collected from over 7,500 law enforcement, media, government, and commercial sources daily to provide near-real-time data about the results of gun violence. GVA is a not-for-profit corporation formed in 2013 and claims to not be an advocacy group.
Their data is online and available for download, so you don’t have to take my word for it:
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/school-shootings
GVA lists 2,000 school “shooting” incidents. I have to use scare quotes because the vast majority of their data includes reports where nobody was injured and no shots were fired. For example, one in five of the reported incidents included no suspect identified nor even confirmation of the presence of a firearm at all.
Analyzing their data, out of the 2,000 reported incidents:
20.65% (413) were all zero: no suspect arrested (or identified) and no injuries
61.55% (1,231) involved a detained suspect with no injuries
82.2% (1,644) of incidents resulted in no injuries
95.7% (1,914) of incidents resulted in no deaths
What’s especially disingenuous about this, Gun Violence Archive also claims there are less than 2,000 Defensive Gun Uses annually in the U.S. because they only count DGUs if confirmed by police or media reports. It’s estimated that 80-90% of DGUs involve no shots fired, which means many don’t end up reported. Yet, they include incidents as “school shootings” where nobody was shot, injured, or even confirmed that a firearm was present. Guy Smith refers to them as Gun Variables Altered, which is a fitting description.
Fear-mongering is necessary when demands are made over statistically-rare incidents, particularly in light of actual dangers. Yes, there is a non-zero chance a child will be shot at school or a person will be killed in a mass shooting. There’s also a non-zero chance you’ll be struck dead by lightning on the same day you win the lottery. That’s not an exaggeration, as America Is Relatively Safe and Tolerant: You are twice as likely to be struck by lightning in the U.S. than be a victim of a mass shooting.
Swimming pools are more dangerous than guns:
Motor vehicle fatalities are about 1,000 times more concerning than being the victim of a spree shooting, never mind health-related concerns that are the real, common causes of death.
A demonstration that this is fear-mongering for political gain, consider the History of Assault Weapon Bans and why that pivot occurred:
I do believe that the GVA includes incidents where school property is hit by gunfire, to include just stray rounds, on any school property even those without students or classrooms, or during hours when the school is closed for holidays or overnight. They use those to conflate the numbers into implicit active shooter events with human victims. So GVA and the Violence Property Center are tainted figures. Worse yet is they lie on purpose and know it:
“’Assault weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic ‘assault weapons’ anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun-- can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”— Josh Sugarman, executive director and founder of the Violence Policy Center (VPC) an anti-gun lobby group.