ABC News is running a crime special this week focused on guns, and they are relying on an outlet that counts self-defense shootings as gun violence.
Breitbart News reported that the week-long special is framed as a focus on gun violence across the country. However, in the midst of coverage, ABC News admitted they “dug” down and discovered “violence occurs disproportionately in poorer, urban areas — from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York City.” In other words, Democrat-run cities.
The Gun Violence Archive also rejects the long-accepted FBI criteria of four fatalities in one incident for a mass shooting. Instead, the Gun Violence Archive will list four injuries in one incident as a mass shooting. As a result, they listed 611 mass shootings in the year 2020.
The Gun Violence Archive listed 335 mass shootings for 2015, and this deserves a closer look as Mother Jones editor Mark Follman addressed the left’s exaggerated claims of mass shootings in 2015.
Follman applied the long-accepted FBI definition of a mass shooting and wrote in the New York Times:
At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have complied an in-depth open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.
That is quite a difference — four mass shootings versus Hollywood’s claims of 355. And, for current purposes, four mass shootings versus the Gun Violence Archive’s claim of 335.
ABC News is relying on Gun Violence Archives in the series One Nation Under Fire.
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