AWR Hawkins at Breitbart noted The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell – a massively best-selling author on nonfiction books, starting with The Tipping Point – recently claimed that school shootings around the world were America’s fault. At The New Yorker Festival, Gladwell called these school shootings “an overwhelmingly American phenomenon” and that school shootings around the world “appear to happen as a reflection of something going on in America.”
Starting with the Barry Loukaitis shooting at Frontier Middle School in Moses Lake, Washington in 1996, Gladwell went on to discuss six other attacks, calling attention to the 1999 attack at Columbine High School as the most pivotal turning-point in school shootings. Gladwell claims that from the Columbine shooting, “things take off,” saying, “We go through Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and the recent shooting at Umpqua Community College.” He continues:
“If you look at this history, two things stand out immediately. One is that this is a very contemporary phenomenon. There is very little that happens of this sort before 1996. The second thing that’s obvious if you look at the history of school shootings is that it’s an overwhelmingly American phenomenon. To the extent that anything like this happens anywhere else in the world, it appears to happen as a reflection of something going on [in America]; it appears to have spread from America.”
Gladwell claims that of the 11 major school shootings, six of them were similar to Columbine, and “if you look between 1999 and 2007, there are 11 cases of thwarted school shootings, where it really does seem like the kids are really going to go through with it. And in all 11 of those cases, it’s Columbine.”
Incidentally, Gladwell made no mention of gun-free zones or the mental state of those accused in the school shootings, all of which are important factors to include and consider when making the outrageous claim that America is responsible for school shootings around the world.
Gladwell, born in England and raised in Canada, started in American journalism on the conservative side, as an intern for the National Journalism Center under M. Stanton Evans and then at The American Spectator and the Washington Times magazine Insight. He first joined the liberal media in 1987 with a nine-year stint at The Washington Post.
