Mass Shootings: The Media Misinformation Campaign
The Gun Violence Archive misrepresents shootings in the U.S. to serve the Left’s political ends.
by David Catron
May 31, 2022, 10:54 PM
If there is any maxim religiously observed by the corporate news media, it is this: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Moreover, if the blood in question gushes from gunshot wounds inflicted by a deranged mass murderer, the major news outlets uniformly portray the crime as evidence of an ever-increasing wave of violence caused not by criminals but by their weapons. This narrative is a textbook example of misinformation whereby news organizations studiously ignore data and definitions on mass shootings developed by Congress, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement sources.
Congress has defined “mass killings” as “3 or more killings in a single incident,” and this is the general guideline used by the FBI in response to requests for assistance from local and state law enforcement agencies. A 2015 report for the Congressional Research Service defined the term “mass shooting” as a “multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms, within one event, and in one or more locations in close geographical proximity.” Yet the corporate media rarely refer to these sources in reports about mass murders involving guns. Instead, the most widely cited media source is the Gun Violence Archive (GVA).
What is GVA? It is a “nonpartisan” organization launched in 2013 by Slate magazine and later taken over by Michael Klein of the leftist Sunlight Foundation. GVA’s definition of “mass shooting” is absurdly elastic, including gang-related shootings, gun crimes committed during robberies, and domestic violence. As of Tuesday morning, the GVA site listed 231 “mass shootings” that have purportedly occurred in 2022. It includes 87 incidents in which no one was killed, 17 that fit the three-death threshold set by Congress, and exactly two incidents — in Uvalde and Buffalo — that conform to the commonly understood definition of “mass shooting.”
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https://spectator.org/mass-shootings-media-misinformation-campaign/
