Fact Check: Forbes Reports Nearly 600 Mass Shootings This Year Based on Misleading ‘Archive’

CLAIM: Forbes reports 592 “mass shootings” through December 8th of this year based on a compilation of data by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA).

VERDICT: False. The GVA counts single fatality incidents, double fatality incidents, and biker bar shootouts with no fatalities, as mass shootings.

Forbes reported:  “Gun sales are on the rise. Mass shootings have also risen this year…The Gun Violence Archive found there have been 592 mass shootings this year through Dec. 8, compared to 417 mass shootings for all of 2019, an increase of 41%.”

Even a cursory glance at the GVAs list of “mass shootings in 2020” shows that ten of the first 25 “mass shootings” had zero fatalities and another ten of the first 25 had only one fatality. So 20 of GVA’s most recent 25 “mass shootings” of 2020 each had either zero fatalities or one fatality.

And of the remaining five “mass shootings” in the first 25, two were double homicides.

The GVA reports these astronomical numbers of “mass shootings” by using a metric that differs from FBI standard that defines mass shootings in the U.S. And Forbes admitted this in their reporting by noting, “The GVA defines mass shootings as a minimum of four victims shot, including killed or injured.”

Breitbart News reported Mother Jones’s editor Mark Follman called out leftist media pundits, gun control groups, and liberal actresses for claiming “355 mass shootings” in 2015. He did so in response to actress Rose McGowan’s claim the December 2, 2015, San Bernardino, California, terror attack was the 355th mass shooting of the year. She tweeted, “355 shootings this year. Well done you f**king idiots.”

Follman countered in a New York Times op-ed, where he wrote:

At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have complied an in-depth open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.

He explained that chasm between the numbers reported by pundits, gun controllers, and actresses versus the numbers he set forth was the result of the fact that the FBI uses one standard count for what constitutes a “mass shooting” while many groups “[suggest] that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others.”

Follman noted the FBI’s measure:

For at least the past decade, the F.B.I. regarded a mass shooting as a single attack in which four or more victims were killed. (In 2013, a mandate from President Obama for further study of the problem lowered that threshold to three victims killed.) When we began compiling our database in 2012, we used that criteria of four or more killed in public attacks, but excluded mass murders that stemmed from robbery, gang violence or domestic abuse in private homes. Our goal with this relatively narrow set of parameters was to better understand the seemingly indiscriminate attacks that have increased in recent years, whether in movie theaters, elementary schools or office parks.

The Forbes report rests on an archive that does not differentiate between four or more killed in public attacks and biker bar shootouts where no one is killed.

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. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.