Florida School Shooting: No, It Was Not The 18th School Shooting This Year — Not Even Close | Stock News & Stock Market Analysis - IBD

Florida School Shooting: No, It Was Not The 18th School Shooting This Year — Not Even Close | Stock News & Stock Market Analysis - IBD:
"The latest mass shooting, which claimed 17 lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, was a horrible tragedy. 

But that's no excuse for the flurry of stories parroting a gun control advocacy group's false claims about school shootings.

• "There have already been 18 school shootings in the US this year" — ABC News
• "18 school shootings in 45 days — Florida massacre is one of many tragedies in 2018"—CNBC
• "18 school shootings in US in 2018"— AFP
• "U.S. averages a school shooting every 2.5 days in 2018" — Politico
• "We're Averaging One School Shooting Every 60 Hours In 2018" — Huffington Post

When not in the headline, this claim shows up in just about every story about the Florida shooting.

So, it must be true, right? Why else would every news outlet be reporting this?
It's not true.

That number comes from a gun control advocacy group — Everytown for Gun Safety — which arrived at 18 only by shoving everything it possibly could into the category of "school shooting."

The simplest check of its list shows how misleading the group is being.

• One of the "school shootings" on the list, for example, involved a Greyson College, Tex., student who accidentally discharged a weapon at the school's Criminal Justice Center during a class supervised by a police officer on how to use handguns.
• Another on the list involved a third grader who accidentally pulled the trigger of a police officer's holstered weapon.
• Two were suicides that happened to take place on school grounds. One of them was a 31-year-old man who shot himself while parked in his car, which happened to be on a school lot— at a school that had been closed for seven months. Another was a student who shot himself in the head in the school's bathroom.
• Three "school shootings" involved fights that broke out between either adults or students in school parking lots — one of them at a college in North Carolina — in which one of the people arguing pulled a gun on the other.
• Another student was shot by a robber, during a robbery that happened to take place in a school parking lot.
• One involved a gun that a 12-year-old brought to school, which accidentally went off inside her backpack.
• In fact, of the 18 "school shootings," only five occurred during school hours, and only four — including the latest — are what most people would consider a school shooting; in which someone brings a gun to school with the intent of shooting students..."

Read on!