CNN Massively Misleads Readers on School Shootings in 2019 When Not Enough Happened
It has been apparent for quite some time that the liberal mainstream media is all-in with the left when it comes to undermining the Second Amendment and supporting gun control measures that would infringe upon the rights of civilians.
A big part of that is how the media sensationalizes and over-hypes certain stories that involve shootings, especially with regard to mass shootings or shootings that occur in a school setting with innocent children involved.
To be sure, shootings that involve innocent children and school students are absolutely tragic, and nobody is seeking to downplay the horror of those incidents.
That being said, what the media sometimes purposefully portrays as a tragic school shooting involving harm to innocent children, actually isn’t that at all — though the media would really like you to think it is.
Case in point is an article from CNN that claimed there have already been 15 school shootings so far in 2019 when that simply isn’t the case.
In fact, CNN essentially debunked their own headline and anti-gun narrative just a few sentences into the article, when they explained the “parameters” of what they, and they alone, believe constitutes a “school shooting.”
Those parameters set by CNN included: One person shot, other than the shooter; the shooting was on school property (which includes a lot of other areas besides just a school building); the inclusion of accidental discharge of a firearm by anyone who isn’t law enforcement or security; and even the inclusion of BB or pellet guns, as those toy weapons have the slightest potential to be lethal.
For our own purposes, we stipulate that the vast majority of the American people consider actual “school shootings” to involve either an adult or student deliberately shooting at multiple other students or faculty inside of or directly adjacent to the school building.
The article then proceeded to list off the dates and locations of the claimed “15 school shootings” so far this year, beginning with the May 7 shooting at a school in Colorado in which one student was killed and seven others wounded.
On that same day, however, CNN also counted the gunshot wound suffered by a Savannah State University student at a campus residential facility as a “school shooting.”
CNN considered a May 4 incident in Oregon, in which a 21-year-old man not affiliated with the University of Oregon was shot outside of a fraternity house.
Worse than that was the inclusion of an accidental discharge in a dorm room at Grambling State University in Louisiana on March 7, which injured one student.
Other incidents included on the list that weren’t really “school shootings” involved a boy on a school bus getting hit by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting in Mississippi on March 27, as well as a family dispute between an adult and a related staff member at a school in Maryland on February 8, not to mention a drug deal gone wrong between two students at a Texas high school on January 31.
Still other incidents included by CNN as “school shootings” included a shooting in Kansas City on February 12 of a 15-year-old student by two adults she had argued with during a basketball game at the school gym. The adults had been escorted out, but waited outside to ambush the student when she left later.
Yet another non-school shooting that CNN nevertheless included involved an adult man utilizing an outdoor high school track after hours. He was shot as he confronted another adult male attempting to break into his parked vehicle.
Arguably the biggest stretch by CNN was the inclusion of an incident on January 31 in Memphis when an ROTC student was injured after being shot with a pellet gun.
One particularly questionable incident that may or may not constitute an actual school shooting involved a mutual exchange of gunfire between two individuals — one of whom was not a student — who had been fighting outside of an Alabama high school on January 25.
In all, only about five or six of the 15 cited incidents were actually the sort of thing that most people would think of when they heard the phrase “school shooting” — an incident in which actual students or faculty were shot in premeditated fashion by a fellow student or an adult, inside the actual school building — and not just in the surrounding or affiliated areas, like parking lots or tracks after hours.
Again, it is horrible that any of these individuals were shot unjustifiably, and we mourn those whose lives were taken and pray for healing for those who were injured. But, again, many of those deaths and injuries were not the result of a “school shooting” as most people understand it.
CNN was grossly misleading, if not outright deceptive, to include such obvious non-school shooting incidents in their list to bolster the numbers in order to further their “guns are bad, m’kay” false narrative.
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