In short – as far as I can follow the logic – the message to parents concerned that there are loaded weapons going off on school property, and that their sons and daughters are at risk of being hit by bullets from those weapons, is this: it doesn’t really count unless the shooter is a pupil, not involved in a gang, who made a pre-meditated plan to massacre a large number of students.
And not in the parking lot.
(If you think this kind of absurdity is confined to the fringe, see this only slightly less mendacious CNN piece, which brings the figure down from 74 to 15 by excluding, among others, shootings motivated by “personal arguments, accidents [or] alleged gang activities and drug deals”. Johnson says the cable channel stole his work.)
What’s especially dispiriting about this flat denial of reality is how little prospect it offers for rational discussion or compromise. Even if you’re a supporter of gun control, you can still hold a reasoned discussion with somebody who believes that the benefits of widespread firearms ownership outweigh the harms. You can discuss international comparisons; and how no comparable country experiences anything like this level of gun violence; the other person can seek to establish why those comparisons aren’t relevant; or that, yes, violent deaths are actually in decline in the US, and so on. But when the pro-gun side of the argument consists of simply insisting that the gun violence that people are so distraught about isn’t real gun violence? Then there’s no clear way forward at all.
And let’s not forget the bigger point here. A pro-gun journalist applies the most stringent imaginable criteria to the term ‘school shooting’; he rejects every instance he possibly can, for reasons many might regard as spurious, and then triumphantly declares that there have only been … seven bona fide school shootings in America since December 2012!
Only seven school shootings since December 2012.
I hope I never to get to the point at which the word “only” in that sentence makes even the slightest bit of sense.
