The Thursday of edition of MSNBC’s Jose Diaz-Balart Reports included a wild claim that 348,000 students in the United States have experienced gun violence at school. The number is in itself misleading, but MSNBC would add another layer of misinformation by suggesting that number represents deaths.
Speaking with the Dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, Victoria Defrancesco Soto, Diaz-Balart asked, “You know, Victoria, a new piece in the Washington Post highlights that 348,000 students in this country have experienced gun violence at schools since Columbine, 348,000. Think about that. What do you think the impact of that is going to be on us all?”
What Diaz-Balart referenced is not actually new, but a database the Post maintains to keep track of school shootings during school hours. However, it is very misleading. The Post lists 376 school shootings, but while that number grabs headlines and provides content for liberal cable networks, the number includes accidental discharges by law enforcement, stray bullets that hit the school, violence from parking lot drug deals, and shots fired by law enforcement to stop would-be assailants with bladed weapons. Uncritically repeating the number makes it seem as if they are all analogous to Monday’s shooting in Nashville, which they simply aren’t.
The Post got the 348,000 number by simply taking 93 percent of the school's enrollment (the average daily attendance number) for shootings that happened during school hours or 50 percent of enrollment if the shooting happened just before or after school hours.
DeFrancesco Soto, however took the misleading number and made it worse, “The impact of the loss of life, of the loss of a child, of the loss of grandchildren. That loss is immeasurable, but the flip side of that and, and, and it pains me to say this is that it desensitizes the public. We're talking in the hundreds of thousands of lives lost because of gun violence and gun violence specifically in schools.”
That is a simply a misrepresentation of the Post’s data. When you add up all the fatalities from the 376 shootings listed, the total comes out to 200 deaths and 421 injuries. It could still be said that 200 deaths is 200 too many, but it is not “hundreds of thousands” and is off by a factor of 1,740. The Post does not included the gunmen in their count, but does include swordsmen.
Moving on, DeFrancesco Soto lamented, “And that is part of the challenge that we're confronting. That within the culture war within that lack of civil discourse that we have, let's add on top of that, the fact that it's just become commonplace. Another day, another school shooting. So while it can push us for more gun reform, at the same time, we have to actively fight against the impulse to just zone it out because it's become so common.”
While this segment was extremely misleading and used to further Diaz-Balart and DeFrancesco Soto’s preferred policy of more gun control, do not expect the fact-checkers to slap it with a “missing context” label.
This segment was sponsored by Jeep.
Here is a transcript for the March 30 show:
MSNBC Jose Diaz-Balart Reports
3/30/2023
11:30 PM ET
JOSE DIAZ-BALART: You know, Victoria, a new piece in the Washington Post highlights that 348,000 students in this country have experienced gun violence at schools since Columbine, 348,000. Think about that. What do you think the impact of that is going to be on us all?
VICTORIA DEFRANCESCO SOTO: The impact of the loss of life, of the loss of a child, of the loss of grandchildren. That loss is immeasurable, but the flip side of that and, and, and it pains me to say this is that it desensitizes the public. We're talking in the hundreds of thousands of lives lost because of gun violence and gun violence specifically in schools.
And that is part of the challenge that we're confronting. That within the culture war within that lack of civil discourse that we have, let's add on top of that, the fact that it's just become commonplace. Another day, another school shooting. So while it can push us for more gun reform, at the same time, we have to actively fight against the impulse to just zone it out because it's become so common.
