By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
Children unintentionally shot and killed more than 157 people last year and wounded more than 270, or so Everytown for Gun Safety would have you believe. NBC News was the first media outlet to lap up this fake-news story.
“The children who pulled the trigger were most often teenagers ages 14 to 17 or children ages 5 and under, according to Everytown’s data, which is compiled from media reports,” the NBC News story claims.
Therein lies the problem: Everytown’s data is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. It is so chock-full of errors that using it to draw any conclusion would become a study in futility. It is pure GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out.
No one wants a firearm to fall into the wrong hands. On that, all can agree. However, as usual, Everytown uses their fake data to advocate for more gun control, in this case mandatory storage laws, which would of course be followed by mandatory home inspections by police, to make sure gun owners were storing their firearms in accordance with the law.
‘Media reports’
Very few sources are as unreliable as initial media accounts, especially when they’re based upon a hasty press release sent by a law enforcement agency after a shooting.
These press releases often contain statements made at the scene by traumatized family members, victims or witnesses, many of whom later become suspects after a more thorough investigation is conducted. These folks will attempt to dodge culpability by telling officers the gun just went off, or someone was playing with it, or they were cleaning the weapon and it magically discharged.
The press releases are most often reported by youngsters – journalists fresh out of college. The absolute last thing they would ever do is question information sent by a sheriff or chief of police. Instead, the release gets a quick write-up and then lives forever on the internet, regardless of the accuracy of the initial data, until Everytown or another anti-gun aggregator uses it to support their biased views.
Gang-related data not excluded
There are more than 100,000 documented gang members just in the city of Chicago. Other large cities are similarly cursed. By far, gang members and unaffiliated drug crews account for the largest number of shootings in the United States, whether they involve juveniles and/or adults. However, news coverage of these shootings rarely addresses the gang affiliation of the shooter or victim.
Gangsters almost never tell police who shot them. They will be the first to make up a story about the weapon miraculously or unintentionally discharging. They seek out their own justice, which leads to more shootings. This is why most seasoned gang investigators will tell you that today’s victim will be tomorrow’s suspect.
One of the entries included in Everytown’s data involves a 2018 shooting in New Orleans. It doesn’t take a criminologist to understand gang involvement likely played a role.
“A group of teenage boys were taking photos of themselves while posing with guns. When witnesses called the police, one of the boys, who was 14, ran away, causing a handgun in his waistband to unintentionally fire and hit him in the leg. Police are continuing to investigate the incident,” the data states.
Gangsters shoot more people intentionally than unintentionally – the supposed topic of Everytown’s report. As long as the left and the legacy media they control refuse to cull out shootings by gang members, their data will always be suspect.
Frequently impeached source
Several of the entries in Everytown’s data were based upon information from the Gun Violence Archive. To be clear, the Gun Violence Archive is not a media source. Like Everytown, it is an aggregator of media reports and, like Everytown, far from a credible source.
The Gun Violence Archive has been debunked more than any other anti-gun group because they knowingly publish false mass-shooing data, and they don’t care how it is misused.
The Gun Violence Archive, or GVA, was founded in 2013 by Michael Klein, a left-leaning philanthropist and open-government advocate, and Mark Bryant, a retired computer analyst and GVA’s current executive director.
According to Bryant’s all-inclusive definition, there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much narrower and more accurate definition.
While the GVA collects and publishes several different types of shooting data – mass murders, number of children and teens killed or injured, officer-involved shootings, defenses gun usages and more – it is their inflated mass-shooting numbers that are cited most often by the mainstream media, given its penchant for sensational headlines.
In a previous interview with the Second Amendment Foundation, Bryant defended his broader definition and the higher body count it yields. “It doesn’t parse,” he said. “It gives an accurate picture of the number of times more than four people were shot, whether in a drive-by or a shooting at a rap concert or a country music concert.”
If his higher numbers are misleading the public or being misinterpreted by journalists, it’s not his fault, Bryant claimed. He believes his numbers are fair. “I do, but I think it’s also up to the journalist and the reader to have a better understanding of what the data says. When a journalist uses the mass-shooting numbers as their lead, they’re not looking at the whole situation.”
Any database that uses GVA data cannot be trusted.
False CDC claims
One of the most repeated falsehoods that Everytown still links to their data states that firearms – not motor vehicle deaths – are the leading cause of death for children.
This was factchecked last year by AWR Hawkins of Breitbart News.
In 2020, Hawkins found that 2,281 were children killed with firearms, but 2,503 were killed in motor vehicle crashes.
“Moreover, according to CDC numbers, children are 27 times more likely to die in an accidental car death than in an accidental gun death, and unintentional suffocation deaths are 10 times higher among children than accidental gun deaths,” Hawkins reported.
Everytown isn’t the only anti-gun outlet to cite false CDC data. Vice President Kamala Harris has parroted the claims – after they were factchecked – several times.
Consider the source
Everytown for Gun Safety is bankrolled by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. It is one of his premier Astroturf (non-grassroots) gun-control groups. Everytown’s action fund has more than $18 million in assets. Its support fund has more than $48 million. Bloomberg’s net worth is estimated at more than $100 billion.
Everytown’s president, John Feinblatt, is also president of the Trace, the propaganda arm of Bloomberg’s anti-gun empire. Both groups have become adept at creating propaganda and pumping it out to a willing media.
That’s exactly how Everytown’s latest report should be received. It is nothing more than anti-gun propaganda designed for anti-gun propagandists.
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