How the mainstream media misleads the public about the frequency of mass shootings

“There have been more mass shootings than days in 2023.” — ABC News

“More mass shootings in U.S. than days in 2023 so far.” — Axios

“There have been nearly 70 mass shootings so far this year.” — Washington Post

This is just a small sampling of recent mainstream media headlines warning of an unimaginable number of mass shootings in our country. This coverage is seized upon by anti-gun activists to push their gun control agenda.

Mass shootings in the US:

2014: 273
2015: 336
2016: 383
2017: 348
2018: 336
2019: 417
2020: 610
2021: 690
2022: 647

In the first seven weeks of 2023: 67

We do not have to live like this. No other country on the planet does.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) February 14, 2023

There have been 67 mass shootings this year. Many of them at our nation’s schools.

We are a sick nation.

Sick with
– the epidemic of gun violence.
– politicians who allow people to die.
– more guns than people.

We can’t even protect our children. https://t.co/yQxjNOMQWP

— Jamaal Bowman Ed.D (@JamaalBowmanNY) February 14, 2023

There’s just one problem: The statistics they’re citing are deeply misleading.

They all come from one source: The Gun Violence Archive. When you or I think of a “mass shooting,” we imagine Parkland, Columbine, Las Vegas, or another such high-profile atrocity where a gunman killed many people at random. However, the Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as any instance where 4 people are shot—not killed.

That’s right: They’re dubbing incidents where no one died as “mass shootings.” To call that a misleading statistical sleight-of-hand is an understatement. They’re also including gang violence. While that’s undoubtedly a serious problem, it is also undoubtedly not what most Americans think of when they define a “mass shooting.”

As Wilfred Reilly explained for National Review, the Gun Violence Archive’s definition is completely untethered from the actual definition of a “mass shooting” traditionally used in criminal and government statistics:

“For basically all of modern history, a mass shooting has had a rather simple definition: a gunman killing multiple people in a public place. Mother Jones, hardly a conservative outlet, describes the standard — per the FBI and most top criminologists — as ‘a single attack in a public place in which four or more victims were killed.’ President Barack Obama revised the standard somewhat in 2013, when he ordered a government investigation into U.S. mass shootings, lowering the cutoff to ‘three or more victims killed’ and causing a slight uptick in recorded incidents. However, both definitions ‘required death’ and were very specifically structured to exclude domestic murder/suicides, gang and Mafia hits, and the like, to focus on a single terrifying event. By the Obama-era definition, there have been exactly 140 true American mass shootings since the 1980s, according to a comprehensive spreadsheet on the Jones website.”

Of course, even one mass shooting is a tragedy. We can and should have a robust debate over gun violence in America and the best public safety policies to prevent them. But it’s deeply dishonest to alarm Americans with essentially false data to scare them into siding with one side of the debate.

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