Florida Democratic Representative Alcee Hastings is the guy responsible for pulling this particular fake data point out of his you-know-what, lodging criticism against President Donald Trump for not making any mention of it in relation to gun violence during his recent State of the Union address to the nation. According to Rep. Hastings, "in 2018, we endured a school shooting nearly once a week" – a patently false statement that was later fact-checked by Politico, of all places, and determined to be misleading, at best.
"It is not apparent from Hastings' statement that the underlying data lumps together various types of shootings on school property – everything from indiscriminate mass shootings to an accidental shooting," writes Amy Sherman for Politico. "A statement about the number of school shootings warrants an explanation of what types of shootings were included," she adds.
Rep. Hastings apparently pulled this data point from Education Week, a national education publication that claims there were 24 school "shootings" in 2018. Divided by 180 days, which represents a typical school year, Rep. Hastings came to the conclusion that, on average, there's a new school shooting every 7.5 days.
On-campus scuffles do NOT count as school "shootings"
But, again, the problem here is that Education Week includes all sorts of scuffles and skirmishes on campus under the banner of "shootings," even though many of these incidents have nothing to do with gun violence. But this hasn't stopped anti-Second Amendment zealots from citing this ambiguous data as "evidence" that guns need to go.
"The Education Week database includes any K-12 shooting on a school property during school or a school event that resulted in injury or death," Sherman adds. "That means it includes both indiscriminate mass shootings as well as other types of incidents such as fights in a parking lot after a football game or an accidental shooting."
Rep. Hastings and others like him are clearly pushing an anti-gun agenda, in other words, cherry-picking data that isn't even accurate in order to make the case that guns are dangerous and causing school shootings on the regular.
"It was a deliberate exaggeration to push a political agenda to infringe upon the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms," comments Joe Huffman on his blog about Rep. Hastings false claims. "They lie. It's part of their culture."
Even Mother Jones admits school "shooting" data are skewed
Believe it or not, the far-Left Mother Jones publication even admitted back in 2012 that statistics on school shootings are skewed, since they typically include any discharge of a firearm on school property as a "shooting."
"It's simple; they start with the desire to ban the keeping and bearing of arms (A), and then they have to come up with the rationalizations for doing so (B)," wrote one of Joe's commenters about the gun control agenda.
"So long as we understand the order of operations (A leads to B), then it all makes sense. So it is that we should never be exasperated over the boldness and the audacity of the lies, but rather we should expect them as a matter of course."
For more related news about the Leftist push for more gun control, be sure to check out GunControl.Fetch.news.
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