Because schools legally prohibit ordinary citizens from carrying guns in schools, we
should deduce that they won't be there to defend against a shooter bent on mayhem.
Having looked at 2 of the 18 "school shootings" this year, I discovered that one was a
range accident which damaged a wall at a criminal justice college. The other was a
cop who allowed a child to pull the trigger of his lodeded & cocked duty weapon.
This is just the 2 I looked at. How many others in this bogus statistic are not really
shootings in the sense that there was injury or intent thereof?
One thing is clear, & should find wide agreement.....
Since over 10% of school shootings are due to poor safety, every gun owner,
including cops, needs much better training in safe gun handling & storage.
There's a regulation which doesn't infringe upon gun rights, but will work.
In the news.....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...1d91fcec3fe_story.html?utm_term=.2de1151fcb2c
The stunning number swept across the Internet within minutes of the news Wednesday that, yet again, another young man with another semiautomatic rifle had rampaged through a school, this time at
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in South Florida.
The figure originated with Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group, co-founded by Michael Bloomberg, that works to prevent gun violence and is most famous for its running tally of school shootings.
“This,” the organization
tweeted at 4:22 p.m. Wednesday, “is the 18th school shooting in the U.S. in 2018.”
A tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) including the claim had been liked more than 45,000 times by Thursday evening, and one from political analyst
Jeff Greenfield had cracked 126,000. New York City Mayor
Bill de Blasio tweeted it, too, as did performers
Cher and
Alexander William and actors
Misha Collinsand
Albert Brooks. News organizations — including MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, Time, MSN, the BBC, the New York Daily News and HuffPost — also used the number in their coverage. By Wednesday night, the top suggested search after typing “18” into Google was “18 school shootings in 2018.”
It is a horrifying statistic. And it is wrong.
Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counted as
the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however,
had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.
Also listed on the organization’s site is an incident from Jan. 20, when at 1 a.m. a
man was shot at a sorority event on the campus of Wake Forest University. A week later, as a basketball game was being played at a Michigan high school, someone
fired several rounds from a gun in the parking lot. No one was injured, and it was past 8 p.m., well after classes had ended for the day, but Everytown still labeled it a school shooting.
Everytown explains on its website that it defines a school shooting as “any time a firearm discharges a live round inside a school building or on a school campus or grounds.”