President Joe Biden (D) claimed on Thursday that there had been more mass shootings in 2024 “than days in the year.”
Biden posted his claim on X:
He offered no substantiation of his claim, no reference to where he found evidence of “more mass shootings … than there have been days in the year.”
Biden made a similar assertion on May 7, 2023, claiming there had been “roughly 200 mass shootings” in America at that point in 2023.
Breitbart News noted that Biden’s claim was reminiscent of others made by many on the left who had begun to use figures from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA). The GVA replaced the standard definition of a mass shooting with one that counts incidents in which there are “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident.”
In other words, a drive-by shooting in which four people are wounded is labeled a “mass shooting” by GVA.
Breitbart News also reported that the Hill relied on GVA’s numbers and reported more than 600 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2022.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a pro-staffer for Pulsar Night Vision. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.