WaPo Debunks Everytown USA's '18 School Shootings in 2018' Claim

(John McCall/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP, File)

After tragic shootings, anti-gun leftists waste no time politicizing the horror and bellowing from every corner of the media for “sane” or “common sense” gun legislation. They then immediately become insane and nonsensical, and it reached some genuinely awful lows on Thursday. S.E. Cupp summed up a huge part of the problem very succinctly:

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It’s not just the media that’s awful, Democratic politicians are as well. California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom took the time to waste some of my tax dollars and post a video blaming the NRA for the shooting:

If the Democrats ever really do want to try and accomplish something, they may want to stop blaming law-abiding citizens for crimes they didn’t commit.

The media could do its part if it made even a cursory attempt at getting facts right. Those “activist hats” Cupp mentioned blind them to any feeling of journalistic responsibility.

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They were trolled by a white supremacist and ran with a story that fit their confirmation bias, which meant it didn’t need to be checked out.

And then there was this:

The Michael Bloomberg-funded anti-gun group Everytown USA has been pushing some propaganda about there having been 18 school shootings already this year. It’s been debunked by many pro-gun people but they’ve stuck to it and, naturally, the MSM lapped it up.

It’s so wrong that even The Washington Post devoted some space to countering it.

The authors of the article note that “it is a horrifying statistic. And it is wrong.”

Everytown plays fast and loose with the criteria, “by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings.”

These include, according to the article, a man who killed himself at an elementary school that had been closed for seven months and some shots that were fired and didn’t hit anything in the parking lot of another school after eight o’clock at night, long after the students were gone.

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This isn’t activism, it’s disingenuous fear-mongering.

School shootings are horrific enough. Lying about them to create more panic is thoroughly degenerate, especially coming from an organization that is purporting to come from the moral high ground.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to have a discussion after a tragedy to consider what can be done to prevent further occurrences. Those of us on the gun rights side of the aisle welcome them. The discussion, however, needs to be an honest one, and the anti-gun people seem to be less and less interested in that.

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