FACT CHECK: Biden Claims There’s a Mass Shooting ‘Every Single Day’ in America

CLAIM: During his speech Tuesday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, President Joe Biden claimed, “There is a mass shooting every single day in this country.”

VERDICT: False, when mass shootings are defined in the traditional way used by law enforcement for years

Biden talked about mass shootings, naming Buffalo, Newtown, Uvalde, and Parkland, among others. He talked of sitting down with the families of shooting victims.

Then he said, “There is as mass shooting every single day in this country, in the streets of America.”

A mass shooting “every single day” would put the number of mass shootings up to at least 365 annually, and the left often claims such numbers when talking about mass shootings. They do it by changing the definition of a mass shooting, abandoning the standard FBI measure of four fatalities in one incident in order to be a mass shooting, exchanging it for a definition that allows murder/suicides, drive-by shootings, or even double homicides to be mass shootings.

In the beginning of December 2015, lefists reacted to the San Bernardino, California, attack by claiming there had been “355 mass shootings” to that point in 2015.

On December 2, 2015, Rose McGowan tweeted that the San Bernardino attack was the 355th such attack, writing, “355 shootings this year. Well done you f**king idiots.”

But on December 4, 2015, Breitbart News pointed out that Mother Jones editor Mark Follman pushed back, noting that the actual number of mass shootings to that point in 2015 was four.

Writing in The New York Times, Follman said:

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.

The bottom line: Mass shootings, when defined correctly, are not common occurrences. They do not occur every month or every week, much less every day.

They are horrendous when they do occur, but it is false to claim there is one a day.

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 Turning Point USA Ambassador. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.