USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- In an online story published Friday CNN admits they used data from the debunked Gun Violence Archive to claim there have been 641 mass shootings in the United States during 2021 – an average of 1.94 mass shootings per day.
Think about that – nearly two mass shootings per day. I’m surprised the legacy media had time to cover anything else, such as COVID, Joe Biden’s daily foibles or the tanking economy since their news crews must have been running from one mass shooting to another every single day, right?
CNN publicly stated they used the Gun Violence Archive’s flawed data:
“The Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit based in Washington, DC and which CNN relies on for its reporting of mass shootings, defines a mass shooting as an incident leaving at least four people dead or injured, excluding the shooter, and does not differentiate victims based upon the circumstances in which they were shot,” the authors admit.
“They counted as many as 417 mass shootings in 2019. And this year, 641 incidents have been recorded.”
The authors actually admit relying upon the GVA for “reporting of mass shootings.” Relying upon the GVA for any news story is toxic. We debunked the Gun Violence Archive in July, in a special report titled: “The Gun Violence Archive and its Scaring of America.”
The GVA is a small nonprofit that 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.
The problem is how Bryant and his 20 staffers define mass shootings. When most people hear the term “mass shooting,” they picture a crazed gunman stalking the halls of a school or a shopping mall, coldly and randomly executing innocent young victims. What does not come to mind are rival drug crews shooting it out in Chicago or Detroit, or a madman murdering his entire family, which no sane person would consider a mass shooting. The GVA makes no such distinction. If four people are wounded, the GVA labels it a mass shooting regardless of the circumstances, and the media and anti-gun politicians lap up the GVA’s inflated stats.
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 realistic definition.
You decide which figure is more accurate and more honest.
CNN isn’t the only organization to be hoodwinked by the inflated GVA stats. The Biden/Harris administration has cited GVA’s data, as have a bevy of other elected officials and political candidates, at the local, state, and federal levels. The New York Times, National Public Radio, USA TODAY, and a host of other media outlets also use GVA’s definition when reporting about mass shootings, because the bigger and scarier the number, the more clicks the story will receive.
When I interviewed Bryant in July for our special report, I asked him if he actually believed that the average news consumer even considers domestic violence or gang warfare when they hear the term mass shooting.
Bryant replied, “I don’t know. I know what we want to do is provide numbers and let the journalists, advocates, and ‘congress critters’ look at the data, glean details and drill down on it.”
Unfortunately, today’s legacy journalists and anti-rights politicians are too lazy to do any drilling down. They prefer to cut and paste Bryan’s off-the-charts stats.
The bottom line: Bryant and his GVA know full well they’re supplying flawed data, which the media treats as gospel. I’m guessing Bryant and his anti-gun pals are laughing about it, too.
This story is presented by the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project and wouldn’t be possible without you. Please click here to make a tax-deductible donation to support more pro-gun stories like this.
About Lee Williams
Lee Williams, who is also known as “The Gun Writer,” is the chief editor of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project. Until recently, he was also an editor for a daily newspaper in Florida. Before becoming an editor, Lee was an investigative reporter at newspapers in three states and a U.S. Territory. Before becoming a journalist, he worked as a police officer. Before becoming a cop, Lee served in the Army. He’s earned more than a dozen national journalism awards as a reporter, and three medals of valor as a cop. Lee is an avid tactical shooter.
CNN, the least trusted name in news
A bit of devil’s advocate here – even if we ‘assume’ that the stats this obviously biased group are ‘correct’ – how does that stack up against vehicle crashes with the same number of ‘victims/?
I won’t even get into the annual slaughter from medical mistakes…………
100% true. Iaptrogenesis & democide is a dirty lies & secrets the establishment like to use as cover & concealment. Malpractice is another racket for them to manipulate & tool to use.
Iatrogenesis
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/iatrogenesis
No one is coming to save you.
If a giant flaming meteor were to wipe Chicago off the map, the national crime rate would drop forty percent overnight.
That’s a bit of an overstatement. Chicago only rarely breaks 10% of homicides. Of course given that they constitute <<1% of the countries population it’s still impressive.
With this definition, the claim is probably totally true. Cook County just crossed 1000 homicides (Chicago with 777), and many of the shootings would no doubt fall into this category. If your criteria were “number of shots fired” during an incident, you could concoct a statistic along the lines of “147,354 shootings involving multiple rounds”. These “statistics” may be valid, but hardly useful.
The 641 would be accurate if one calculates as follows:
-equates to 12 people killed in mass shooting a weekend
-Chicago will have at least 600 murder shootings this year
-shootings in Chicago are never reported by CNN
-that city alone would be close to the number CNN touted for the country
wow if shootings like that happened every weekend in Dallas, CNN would relish the reporting….
They must be referring to the murders in and around the chicago area, which is actually over 1000(so far)…
A quick DuckDuckGo search for “total US population”: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=total+US+population&atb=v256-1&ia=web will show something well upwards of 331 MILLION citizens in the US, at least as of 2020. So in a nation of some 331 MILLION+ people, CNN can no longer even draw in 1 million viewers – substantially less than 1 million – even during their very best primetime hours. Less than 1 million viewers out of some 331 million possible is a valid mathematical description for “fringe element”. Their entire viewership base could suddenly vanish from the face of the earth, and most of the rest of the country would… Read more »
CNN is so full of BS is not even funny!
Communist news network claims 641 mass shooting ? Where did this occur ? Only in thier minds , because we know better . Only a idiot would believe the communist propaganda machine CNN. They lie about the numbers daily to support thier false narratives and communist agendas .
it is the clinton news network, but communist will also work.
At what point do people
Wake up ?
Regarding the new Covid-19 variant see below.
We are all being played over & over. World’s a Stage.
OMICRON Movie 1963 Sci-Fi Comedy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpXR7fL0D5M
Do DHS & FBI False Flag events count ?
Asking for a friend.
If the left wingers didn’t have lies, they wouldn’t have any arguments.
Let GVA define “mass shootings” the way they want. It works against their narrative. Dig into the details and you will find a high percentage of those “mass shootings” occur in neighborhoods with dysfunctional micro-cultures. The murder/non-negligent homicide rate in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago is 15,000% higher than in many other areas of the U.S. Note that when someone is shot in Englewood, they are whisked off to some of the best surgical teams in the world who have extensive experience in treating GSWs. If it wasn’t for this, the murder/non-negligent homicide rate in Englewood would be even higher.… Read more »
Downvoting three amigos, my suggestion was for Lee to use data and logic to make the argument, not you. You haven’t the machinery for it.
There were at least four downvotes.
Aside from “guns bad”, Englewood serves as a great demonstration that rifle bans and UBC make no sense. Any idea what fraction of those shootings happen with rifles or shotguns? I’d bet far less than one percent, possibly a vanishingly small number – single digit or less per year. As for UBC – how many of the shooters ‘legally’ possessed the firearms? How would UBC impact those who’ve already illegally acquired those guns.