redbloodedamerica:

Fake News on School Shootings

Gun-Grabber: Have you heard?  There were nearly 240 school shootings in a single year in the US!  How many more lives must be lost before everyone shuts up and passes the laws I
tell them to pass?

Joe Citizen: Uh, I’m all for sensible gun laws, but 240?  That sounds a bit
too high for me to buy.

Seamus: That’s because it is! 

Gun-Grabber: Ah! You?  Go away!

Seamus:  Sorry, can’t outrun
this one.  According to the data you’re using, any discharge of a weapon on school
property is counted as a school shooting. 

Joe Citizen:

“That seems reasonable.” 

Gun-Grabber:  “Yeah, it seems
reasonable!” 

Seamus:  So for example, in 2018, there was an incident where a man committed
suicide in  an abandoned school parking lot late at night, and that was counted as a
“school shooting.” 

Joe Citizen:  That doesn’t seem reasonable, alright. 

Seamus:  And the figures which
suggest school shootings to be in the hundreds mostly consists of similar
embellishments.  The best stat that we have on this is that over the past 25 years on
average about 10 kids per year have died in school shootings.  So, there’s really
no possible way there could have been 240 shootings in a single year. 

Gun-Grabber:  Oh yeah?  Well, I’ll have you know that this
number is from the US Department of Education.  And we know government data is
always airtight.  Which means there are school shootings almost every single day.  School shootings happen more often than they don’t.  And why?  Because of the NRA, that’s why.  They’re spending millions of dollars per year to hire trained
assassins who pass directly through the gun-show loophole directly into your child’s school! 

Stuffy Republican:  But didn’t NPR just release
an article which found that a 161 of those shootings never
actually happened – most of them were misrepresented or misreported on in some
way, and that only 11 of them could actually be confirmed as listed? 

Gun-Grabber:

NPR?  Do you mean
NRA Public Radio?  Why would you trust those bigots?  

Elitist Snob:  Um, I used to work for NPR
I’ll have you know they’re anything but conservative bigots, okay?  

Joe Citizen:  Yeah, if anything NPR leans left.

Seamus:  But that didn’t stop Facebook from marking their aforementioned article
on school shootings as “spam.” 

Gun-Grabber:  Good!  Discourse shouldn’t be allowed on this issue! 

Joe Citizen: 

You’re
telling me Facebook really tried to suppress this info? 

Seamus:  Yep, unfortunately to many of the out-of-touch monopolists in Silicon Valley, whether or not
something is fake news has a bit too much to do with whether or not it affirms
their political biases, and a bit too little to do with whether or not it’s
factual.  

So to recap, school shootings are extremely rare, deaths due to them are
even less common, and social media giants are acting as censorious suppressors
of free information cultivating an uninformed populace and fostering a culture
of partisan ignorance and they need to be stopped before it’s too…