Redefining 'school shootings' so they don’t count

http://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/jun/12/gun-lobby-tactic-redefining-school-shootings

The gun lobby’s new tactic: redefining 'school shootings' so they don’t count
If you’d lost the capacity to be appalled by those opposing reform of America’s gun laws, their latest effort should fix that

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.

Let’s be fastidiously fair to Johnson and his supporters by acknowledging that a handful of the incidents he identifies do seem misclassified. Most people, for example, would surely agree that a shooting that doesn't happen on a school campus isn’t a school shooting. But the rest of his alleged debunkings offer a truly depressing glimpse of how pro-gun argumentation works these days.

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