With the midterms fast approaching Voice of America (VoA) notes Democrats are running on gun control and suggests this may be a winning strategy.

According to VoA, gun control used to be a topic Democrats avoided “for fear of alienating voters in conservative districts.” But Democrats hoping to benefit from high profile gun control campaigns by student activists, celebrities, and the gun control lobby, are openly pushing gun control this time around.

They note that even in states as steeped in gun culture as Texas, “U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a progressive Democrat, is challenging Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, a conservative who has received an A+ rating from the NRA.” And O’Rourke is doing that with a campaign to ban “assault weapons,” expand background checks, and add other gun controls.

VofA suggests an “epidemic of mass shootings” has put gun control front and center. They bolster their claim of an “epidemic” by quoting numbers from the Gun Violence Archive, a gun control statistics site that records shootings as “mass shootings” even if no one is killed. This is a much lower threshold than the FBI’s standard measure of four fatalities in one incident and it encourages claims of obscene numbers of mass shootings.

For example, VoA quotes Gun Violence Archive numbers claiming 608 mass shootings in the last two years.

Reports using the FBI standard measure show that America witnessed less than 100 mass shootings during the years 1966 to 2012. Mother Jones quoted the University of Alabama study showing 90 mass shootings during that 45-year period.

So, we had 90 mass shootings over a 45-year period but VoA quotes figures to have us believe there were 608 such incidents over the past two years alone.

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.