The School Shootings That Weren’t – NPR [1]

We have a bit of an anomaly this time: an NPR [2] article that borders on being pro-2nd Amendment [3] – alright, maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic. If nothing else, however, it exposes the truly nebulous definition of the term “school shooting,” [4] and just how simple it is to manipulate words [5] to elicit emotional reactions for the sake of propelling an agenda forward.

The article begins by citing the Department of Education’s 2015-2016 School Climate And Safety report, [6] claiming that in the 2015-2016 school year, there were 235 separate shootings recorded. Sensing that something was amiss, NPR got in touch with every school on the list over the course of three months and were only able to independently confirm 11 incidents. The article explains:

In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries.

So we have active shooter drills in preschools, [7] a Federal Commission on school safety, [8] and a nearly $60 billion budget allocated to the Department of Education [9] – yet we can’t even obtain accurate data on the number of shootings that take place in schools across the country? If you’re thinking that we might be skipping a few steps here, you’re not alone.

Let’s start from the beginning: what is a “school shooting?” The Civil Rights Data Collection [10] defines it as “…any discharge of a weapon at school-sponsored events or on school buses,” commenting that “that would be a rate of shootings, and a level of violence, much higher than anyone else had ever found.”

NPR compares the results of the Civil Rights Data Collection with those of the Everytown for Gun Safety database, [11] reporting 29 incidents in the 2015-2016 school year, and with those of the ACLU of Southern California, [12] who said that “Over 138 of the schools contacted have confirmed the errors, while only 11 have confirmed school shootings.” [13]

So, then, what is the reason for over half of “school shootings” being errors? NPR presents their findings:

The biggest discrepancy in sheer numbers was the 37 incidents listed in the CRDC for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Roseann Canfora, the district’s chief communications officer, told us that, in fact, 37 schools reported “possession of a knife or a firearm,” which is the previous question on the form.

The number 37, then, was apparently entered on the wrong line.

A simple clerical error. The article continues:

Similarly, the CRDC lists four shootings among the 16 schools of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District in California. Gail Pinsker, spokeswoman for the district, says that “going back 20-pluys years, no one can remember any incident involving a firearm. Their best guess, she says, is that there was some kind of mistake in coding, where an incident involving something like a pair of scissors, for example, got inflated into one involving a firearm.

Interesting. Between only these two districts, there are already 41 falsely-reported school shootings – nearly twice the number of actual shootings reported by Everytown for Gun Safety – and they were all the result of reporting errors or vague and deceptive questioning:

As an example of this lack of alignment, the federal Gun-Free Schools Act [14] requires schools in states that receive federal funds to expel students who bring a gun to school and requires districts in those states to report the circumstances of such expulsions to the state – regardless of whether a gun goes off.

The state of Florida [15] asks schools to report “weapons possession,” excluding pocketknives. California asks schools [16] to report suspensions and expulsions resulting from “possession, sale, furnishing of a firearm” or “imitation firearm.”

To summarize: the Civil Rights Data Collection report claims that there were nearly 240 separate school shootings reported, but only 10-30 of those were able to be independently verified by outside sources such as NPR and Everytown for Gun Safety; the other 200-plus shootings were misreported, misunderstood, or misinterpreted in some other way.

NPR reached out to a Department of Education spokeswoman, who, in typical government fashion, claimed that “…any ‘misreporting’ is the schools’ responsibility, not the department’s,” and stated that the original 2015-2016 CRDC report would not be republished, though corrections to the data would be publicized. However, the real data is almost irrelevant as long as the claim: “240 school shootings took place in the 2015-2016 school year” remains seared into the consciousness of rabid gun-control advocates.

Perhaps instead of restricting sales of ammunition [17] and banning the sale of semi-automatic rifles [18] by employing the hysteria-inducing term “assault weapon,” [19] our elected officials should be focusing on the destruction of the nuclear family – oh, you didn’t know that almost every school shooter in the past few decades has come from a single mother household? [20] [21] [22] [23] How about the fact that almost every school shooter in the past few decades has also been under the influence of pharmaceuticals, mostly antidepressants? [24] [25] [26] [27]

Probably just right-wing conspiracy theories.

Sebastian Martin Haller, 9/23/2018

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent

[2] https://www.npr.org/

[3] https://infogalactic.com/info/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

[4] https://infogalactic.com/info/School_shooting

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp3TQf2xDc8

[6] https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/school-climate-and-safety.pdf

[7] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-shootings-active-shooter-drills/

[8] https://www.ed.gov/school-safety

[9] https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget18/index.html

[10] https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/data.html

[11] https://everytownresearch.org/gunfire-in-school/

[12] https://www.aclusocal.org/

[13] https://www.aclu.org/issues/juvenile-justice/school-prison-pipeline/race-discipline-and-safety-us-public-schools?redirect=schooldiscipline

[14] https://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg54.html#sec4141

[15] http://www.fldoe.org/safe-schools/sesir-discipline-data/

[16] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/sd/fssd.asp

[17] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/us/california-gun-control-ammunition-bullets.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FGun%20Control&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=collection

[18] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-massachusetts/u-s-judge-upholds-massachusetts-assault-weapons-ban-idUSKCN1HD2CW

[19] https://infogalactic.com/info/Assault_weapon

[20] https://winteryknight.com/2015/10/03/the-link-between-single-mother-welfare-fatherlessness-poverty-crime-and-school-shootings/

[21] https://ivn.us/2015/10/12/the-complex-yet-startling-link-between-single-parenting-and-mass-shootings/

[22] http://thefederalist.com/2015/07/14/guess-which-mass-murderers-came-from-a-fatherless-home/

[23] https://palebluenews.com/rick-santorum-says-single-mothers-are-to-blame-for-school-shootings-video/

[24] http://www.ssristories.net/school-shooting

[25] http://www.drugawareness.org/ssri-nightmares/school-shootings/

[26] https://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/psychiatric_medications_3.1.pdf

[27] https://www.wnd.com/2012/12/psych-meds-linked-to-90-of-school-shootings/