ABC News Uses Data from Group Counting Self-Defense as Gun Violence

ABC News is running a crime special this week focused on guns, and they are relying on an outlet that counts self-defense shootings as gun violence.

Breitbart News reported that the week-long special is framed as a focus on gun violence across the country. However, in the midst of coverage, ABC News admitted they “dug” down and discovered “violence occurs disproportionately in poorer, urban areas — from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York City.” In other words, Democrat-run cities.

Nevertheless, ABC News presents gun violence as a national problem by relying on numbers from the Gun Violence Archive, an outlet that lists defensive gun uses and officer gun uses against criminals as “gun violence.”

The Gun Violence Archive also rejects the long-accepted FBI criteria of four fatalities in one incident for a mass shooting. Instead, the Gun Violence Archive will list four injuries in one incident as a mass shooting. As a result, they listed 611 mass shootings in the year 2020.

The Gun Violence Archive listed 335 mass shootings for 2015, and this deserves a closer look as Mother Jones editor Mark Follman addressed the left’s exaggerated claims of mass shootings in 2015.

Breitbart News reported that Follman addressed leftist media pundits, gun control groups, and actresses like Rose McGowan, who claimed 355 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2015.

Follman applied the long-accepted FBI definition of a mass shooting and wrote in the New York Times:

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.

That is quite a difference — four mass shootings versus Hollywood’s claims of 355. And, for current purposes, four mass shootings versus the Gun Violence Archive’s claim of 335.

ABC News is relying on Gun Violence Archives in the series One Nation Under Fire.

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 Instagram: @awr_hawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.