The New York Times editorial board claims “at least 700 mass shootings” occurred over the least two years and 96 people are killed by firearms every day.
The column was written to correspond with the second anniversary of the June 12, 2016, shooting at the gun-free Orlando Pulse nightclub. The gunman in that attack had a “statewide firearms license” enabling him to serve as an armed security guard and he passed a background check for the handgun and rifle he carried on the night of his attack. Moreover, he passed a waiting a period for the handgun.
The NYT quotes James Alan Fox to show that a homicide here or there does not galvanize people to pursue gun control, but mass shootings can redirect the public discourse on guns. And they claim “at least 700 mass shootings” over the past two years, a figure which would certainly redirect discourse if it were accurate. But the only way to substantiate such a claim is to count incidents in which people are only injured with incidents in which people are actually killed. And it requires counting gang and street crime in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis, among other Democrat-controlled cities.
Claims of 350 mass shootings annually are nothing new. In fact, the left claimed 355 mass shootings in 2015, forcing Mother Jones’ editor Mark Follman to correct the record. Follman pointed out that the actual number of mass shootings in 2015 was four.
After claiming 700 mass shootings the NYT editorial board wrote that “96 Americans die by firearms” every day on average. They checked their own claim by admitting that “two in every three of those [deaths] are suicides.” In other words, 66 percent of firearm deaths are suicides rather than the result of the left commonly describes as ‘gun violence.’
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, 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. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.