CNN buckles under pressure from gun nuts, reduces number of school shootings by 80% in report.

Courtesy of Think Progress:

When students are killed, injured, or put in harm’s way on school grounds, when does it “count” as a school shooting? Not all of the time, according to a number of right-wing commentators — and CNN. 

In a news report published Thursday, CNN amends its prior reporting that there were 74 school shootings since the Newtown Massacre — a number calculated by gun violence prevention group Everytown for Gun Safety — and concludes that there have instead been just 15. 

“CNN determined that 15 of the incidents Everytown included were situations similar to the violence in Oregon — a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school,” the article explains. Except for the times when those criteria don’t apply: “Some of the other incidents on Everytown’s list included personal arguments, accidents and alleged gang activities and drug deals,” the article explains, apparently nixing Everytown’s bright line criteria that encompassed all incidents “when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds, as documented in publicly reported news accounts” in exchange for its own subjective assessment. 

Among those incidents not included was a brawl that escalated outside a college basketball game at Chicago State University, a shooting at a Mississippi town’s football game that left a 15-year-old dead, and a Georgia college that saw two shootings in two days. As Everytown points out in response to CNN, these discounted shootings led to 25 deaths and 45 injuries. They included familiar scenes of students hiding under desks and running for cover. And many of them were characterized by CNN as “school shootings” at the time of the incidents.

Apparently, as Gawker points out, what changed CNN's mind about what constitutes a "school shooting" was the twitter attack by one lone 2nd Amendment supporter, and the Right Wing news outlets that supported him: 

The drumbeat of news about gun violence in the United States is so steady and rhythmic these days that it’s starting to fade into the background. Another week, another school shooting. One of the biggest risks now is of a population-wide numbness, eroding the will to tackle the crisis. So perhaps we should be grimly grateful whenever the gun lobby demonstrates that it retains the power to horrify. 

Case in point: this sequence of tweets by the conservative journalist Charles C Johnson, featured on Glenn Beck’s website The Blaze and on Hot Air, and being forwarded enthusiastically everywhere among pro-gun tweeters and bloggers. (I found it via Quinn Norton.) 

Johnson takes it upon himself to debunk the claim, made by the gun reform group Everytown for Gun Safety, backed by Michael Bloomberg, that there have been 74 school shootings since Adam Lanza killed 20 children, six adults and himself at Sandy Hook elementary School 18 months ago. In fact, Johnson concludes, there have only been seven. How does he manage this feat of mathematical magic? Simple: by narrowing the definition of “school shooting” so far that almost none of them count.

I read through the tweets and the articles that they linked to, and to be fair the guy had a point about a small number of the shootings. And that number was one.

The rest were injuries, murders, and suicides, all the result of a gun fired on school grounds.

In other words due to a school shooting.

Hey I totally get it. If I was trying to defend lax gun laws, and there was this much data to suggest the need for a change, I might be tempted to undermine the findings as well.

Besides as we all know the Right Wing simply does not like facts, because they never seem to benefit their side.

However these are not simply facts, these are preventable deaths. And a news organization fudging the number of gun deaths in order to protect the Right Wing's favorite constitutional amendment and their delicate feelings is unconscionable and demonstrates a lack of journalistic ethics.