Then you leave out Republican controlled areas with even more violence and higher murder rates like St Louis and Birmingham.
It depends on which source you're looking at for how they count incidents. America leads total gun deaths every year because we have the most guns. Accidents and suicides are increasingly problematic as we mix gun issues with the opioid crisis.
My definition of school shooting is a person with intent, packing a weapon, going into a school with the goal of shooting and killing people. To put accidents and suicides under that column is disingenuous and quite frankly bullshit. It's purposeful embellishment with the intent to misinform people for the sake of pushing one's own agenda. The worst kind of backhanded political trickery. I consider it evil.
Sure, but not every source is going to report those deaths as school shootings (although they technically are). Mass shootings would be a better specifier to use if you want to guarantee more than one person involved.
That still wouldn't justify accidental discharges with no injuries as a "shooting". Like I said, one was a training facility for the use of firearms. That definition is way too broad.
They don't refer to students hanging themselves at school as "School Hangings"... Why would a suicide or accidental discharge be a "School Shooting".. Not seeing the logic here.
All it means is that the definition of school shooting is different than what you thought it was. It's literally any shooting that occurs at a school. That doesn't mean they're being disingenuous, it means this is a common misconception.
When a huge majority of people don't consider accidental discharges or firing without the intent of hurting others as a shooting and you know the average person wouldn't, but you report that anyway.. that makes you a liar. The key component here is purpose. They purposefully misinformed.
I don't know what better descriptor you want them to use for these incidents. "Suicide by gun at school?" It's literally just a different way of saying "school shooting." You might not like how they phrase it, but it doesn't make it incorrect.
They reported that with the Florida incident. There was no reason to because they aren't the same thing. If we had 100 accidental discharges in a firing range at a police academy where on a back wall built to catch stray bullets was hit, did we have 100 school shootings? Would you report that as a crisis? No, so you can't add them to a real crisis for embellishment.
What you're suggesting is ignoring gun deaths in schools when there's only a single victim. There's no other statistic they would fall under in this case. As much as we'd like to do that in America to deflate our gun death numbers some, it seems extremely unethical.
We can't even solve our own problems and you're stupid enough to expect us to solve the world's problems.
What's unethical is comparing non-injuries, suicides, and mass murder under a blanket term that's been skewed. They are different things that need to be handled differently. The non-injuries take away from the seriousness of suicide and murder.
I do take it seriously, but they're different. Suicide is purely a mental health issue. Not a gun control issue. If someone kills themself at school by any other means it's just a suicide. If they shot themselves it's on par with a school shooting?
