If you’ve been following the unfolding story of Wednesday’s mass shooting at a Florida High school, which left at least 17 people dead and numerous more injured, you’ve likely heard this claim making the rounds on the news and social media:

“Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida marks the 18th school shooting in 2018 alone.”

No, it’s not.

Firstly, let’s look at where this claim originated. This false stat comes from Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control activism group known for peddling false gun violence statistics. This isn’t the first time they’ve been caught spewing nonsense. It likely won’t be the last.

Everytown’s “18 school shootings” number is wildly misleading, at best. Instead of calculating the number of times a person intentionally shot upa a school, Everytown's compilation includes every instance of a gun being discharged on or near school property, including suicides on school property, stray bullets fired near a school, and accidents that had nothing to do with intentional gun violence against children.

In fact, in addition to the statistically rare instances in which an armed assailant shows up and mows down a bunch of school children, that magical “18” number includes (from Everytown’s own analysis):

A school liaison officer was sitting on a bench talking with some students when a third-grader pressed the trigger on the officer's holstered weapon, causing it to fire and strike the floor. The holster was equipped with a trigger guard designed to prevent such accidental discharges, so the department is reviewing the circumstances surrounding the event.

A 31-year-old man pulled into the parking lot of East Olive Elementary School and called 911, saying he was suicidal and had a handgun. For several hours a negotiator, dispatched to the scene, spoke with the man, who was a military veteran with PTSD. But the man shot himself and died from his injuries. The school was closed at the time.

Gunshots, which most likely originated off-campus, hit a window of the visual arts building at California State University, San Bernardino. Classes were immediately canceled as the university went into lockdown, though a police search failed to turn up any shooter on campus.

A 12-year-old female student unintentionally discharged a handgun in a school classroom. A 15-year-old boy was shot in the head and a 15-year-old girl was shot in the wrist. Police arrested the female shooter and charged her with negligent discharge of a firearm. The source of the gun and why she had it on school grounds remains under investigation.

A criminal justice club student picked up a loaded gun, belonging to an advisor, which the student thought was an unloaded training weapon. She then shot at a wall target, unintentionally firing a bullet, which went through the wall and broke a window. The advisor was a licensed peace officer permitted to carry a firearm on campus.

The vast majority of other instances involved altercations between students, most of which either resulted in only one victim and no fatalities.

Only three of those 18 incidents, including Wednesday’s shooting in Parkland, involved gunmen – all of them students – entering a school building and firing indiscriminately, a situation that most Americans would classify as a “school shooting.”

While even the most infrequent school shootings are never to be taken lightly, the only way to begin addressing gun violence is to first acknowledge the facts.

And the claim that there have been 18 “school shootings” in the U.S. since the beginning of 2018 is not one of them.