Our good friend at the Washington Free Beacon Stephen Gutowski – formerly of our sister site MRCTV – has an excellent piece up about how the liberal media are credulously parroting lefty gun-control advocates' who make it out as though there is literally just one mass shooting in America every day of the year.
As Steve shows in his piece, it's simply not true as judged by impartial criteria laid down by the FBI.
You can read the full post here, but here's an excerpt (emphasis mine):
Many national news outlets shared mass shooting statistics derived from an anti-gun subsection of the social media site Reddit on Tuesday despite the fact that those numbers clash with a related official standard cited by the FBI.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, CBS News, MSNBC, and Newsday all claimed that the shooting in San Bernardino, California was the 355th mass shooting this year. The number was also shared on cable news during coverage of the shooting. The figure is derived from a group of activists who run a “subreddit” named “Guns Are Cool.”
The “Guns are Cool” site describes a mass shooting as any event where four or more people, including the shooter, are injured. This is a looser criteria than the FBI definition of mass murder, which it describes “as a number of murders (four or more) occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders.”
Under the FBI standard only 21 of the 355 shootings identified by the anti-gun group qualify as mass murder with a firearm.
Though the FBI does not officially count mass shootings, it has studied “active shooter incidents” that involve “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.” In a report released last year, the FBI found over a thirteen year period, between 2000 and 2013, there were 160 “active shooter incidents.” Those incidents do not include gang-related shootings, but do include incidents where nobody was shot or killed.
Many of the shootings that do meet the FBI’s stricter mass murder standard still do not closely resemble Tuesday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino. Of the other shootings that would be considered to be “mass murder” by the FBI, ten involved a shooter killing their relatives, four were drug or gang related, and another was a robbery. Two more involved families murdered on private property in which police have not yet released a motive.
The remaining three include the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, and the terrorist attack on a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
