Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in American (MDA) and Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) are pushing a report that claims “44 school shootings” took place between December 15, 2012–the day after the heinous crime at Sandy Hook Elementary–and February 10, 2014.
They stress that 28 people were killed as a result of the attacks, while 37 others were wounded. To heighten the emotional impact of these numbers, MAIG “emphasized that one of these [school shootings] occurred every 10 days.”
What they don’t mention is that many of these “school shootings” were actually suicides with no one else around, or suicides that took place after hours when the campus was abandoned, or gang-related crimes that hyper-inflated the number of K-12 school shootings.
Writing for Fox News, John Lott shows that 11 of the 28 deaths MDA and MAIG attributed to “school shootings” were actually suicides. One of these occurred on school grounds late at night when no one was around. Another was a professor at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology who killed himself “in an empty classroom.” Yet another was “a 19-year-old man [who] committed suicide in the parking lot of a Portland, Maine, high school.”
Other “school shootings” in the MDA and MAIG report include “a 38-year-old man who was shot to death at 2 a.m. on the grounds of the Clarksville, Tennessee, High School” and a “19-year-old who was killed at 9 p.m. in a field near the Hillside Elementary School in San Leandro, California.”
Note that the 19-year old was not even killed on campus, but his death made MDA and MAIG’s list because it was “near campus.”
Another “school shooting” in the MDA/MAIG report is an incident where a student at Eastern Florida State College retrieved a lawfully possessed gun from his car and fired a shot at a man attacking him with a pool cue. Police ruled the student had fired the gun in self-defense.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins.
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