Comments

1
CNN is the TLC of cable news. Nothing they say matters anymore.
2
What could possibly be the reason to exclude those?

....ummm they're poor?
3
Ok, fine. 15 then. Is that acceptable?
4
@3:

Exactly. This is simply CNN trying to shut down criticism from the Far Right Ammo-sexuals (we should all start using this term!), but it completely ignores the forest for the trees, as it were.
5
Well as long as they have a reason--the bullets don't hurt as much. It does sound like CNN is trying to down play the extent of the problem. I think it is a good distinction to note that violence has different causes and therefore if you are going to address it, you will probably need to take a multifaceted approach. I don't find it is surprising that only 15 were random attacks--generally violence is directed at a person in response to something specific.
6
This is quibbling over semantics, nothing more.
7
Well, that's one way to reduce gun violence. Just ignore it.
8
One could argue that a disturbed person walking into a school with a bunch of guns intending to commit mass murder is a quantifiably different (and more terrifying) phenomenon than one person shooting one other person over a grievance that involves only them. But it doesn't matter...@3 is correct.
9
@2 Close. Would it make it clearer if CNN said that they'd just treat it as 3/5 of a shooting?
10
So a couple of non-student 20-somethings meet on the grounds of some random school in their neighborhood at 2 a.m. for a drug deal, get into an argument, and one of them shoots the other. That should count as a "school shooting"? What could possibly be the reason for an anti-gun group to include those... umm, to inflate the statistics?
11
Next: CNN erases all the rapes that weren't real rape. You know, rape rape.
12
@9 puts it very nicely.
13
They need to discount shootings at college and university settings, too, because they might at best be categorized as college and university shootings, not schools shootings. So no Santa Barbara or Seattle Pacific U shootings should count.
14
Why be concerned about "workplace shootings" if it's just that fidgety guy in the mailroom who has it in for one of the custodians, or a spat in the executive suite?
15
It's the same logic as the logic of differentiating a standard assault and a hate crime. The fact is that a mass-shooting has a greater effect on a community than a circumstantial/individual shooting.
16
@14: We need to be concerned about "workplace shootings" when they are actually terrorists strikes relabeled out of dereference to adversaries by the Obama administration (e.g. Ft. Hood).
17
If you're mad at someone in particular and you shoot that person, your gun violence doesn't count as much as a person who walks into a school and starts shooting indiscriminately in the count of incidences of people walking into schools and shooting indiscriminately.

15 is already too many. You don't need to start counting anything involving a gun at a school, or near a school, or in the same town as a school, or involving someone who once went to a school. Inflating the numbers is disingenuous and doesn't do anyone any good.
18
The best method of shutting down your opponents is redefining the parameters of the debate. That's what gun nuts and industry lobbyists are desperately trying to do right now: obfuscate, distort, manipulate definitions, suppress research, etc. The arms industry has taken a page form the tobacco playbook of the 1990s. They know they can't win a fair debate in good faith.
19
@17 I'm sure the children, teachers, and faculty that witness targeted shootings will take heart in knowing it wasn't indiscriminate. I get what you are saying, the risk to everyone is lower in those circumstances, but I'll bet the trauma is pretty similar.
20
@16: I think I'll just let your daft theorizing dangle out there in the fresh air and sunlight, raindrop.
21
When even PolitiFact calls you a liar, guess what? You're a liar.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/…
23
Politifact is hardly authoritative, but worth a read in this case.

And in this case, both sides stretch the facts to suit their preferred emotional appeals.
24
@4, ammosexuals is a great term.
25
@22, I don't think I've ever seen PolitiFact be "full of shit" about anything, so I guess you're the one who can claim that title.

And, @23, while I agree that both sides have been known to play a little loose with the facts, in this case that's not the case. The gun-grabbers have clearly invented facts to justify their hysterical screaming. In other words, yeah, they lied. Big time.
26
It is semantics, but semantics matter. When you hear "school shooting," the first thing you think of isn't an accidental firing in someone's pants as happened at Grady High in Atlanta or a NEAR Moorehouse College campus (as in "not on campus) shooting of a recent college graduate.

The problem isn't simply that we have too many shootings at school. The problem is that we have too many shootings of people. Yeah, we should care about these shootings, but "school" shouldn't be the word that moves us. We should do something about gun violence whether it happens in (or near) schools or not. The map isn't just clearly disingenuous; it has way the fuck too few shootings on it.
27
"The problem is that we have too many shootings of people." Hmm. I just crunched some numbers on that, and I beg to differ with you.

The actual number of shootings a year, once you throw out the suicides, has hovered around 9,000 for many years now (and is actually declining slightly).

New research has uncovered the fact that, of those 9,000, 95% of the victims had a previous felony conviction. That gives us about 450 non-felons getting shot every year.

Divided by the current US population of 319,000,000, this means that a non-felon has a .00014% chance of being shot to death in a year.

Now, I'd rather not be one of those 450 (and I still believe that being able to defend myself is the best way to not become one of those statistics), but come on. That's an incredibly tiny percentage. We don't need fewer shootings, we need a lot less hysteria.
28
@27: The problem with your last line is that what you actually meant is that YOU need less hysteria because people being upset about shooting deaths reflects poorly on your habit of stockpiling deadly weapons.

WE need fewer shootings, even if you do not care. Most people are sane enough to realize that people being shot is worse than people being overly upset about people being shot.
29
@27: I'm honestly curious about the 95%-of-shooting-victims-are-felons figure. Only 450 non-felons are killed with firearms every year? Bullshit. In 2011, 565 minors (under 18) were shot and killed (source). (Also, ~9000 is the figure for people shot and killed with firearms, not including those shot and wounded.) Given that minors are much less likely than adults to be convicted felons...
It's not definitive, I know, but I'd love to see your source for that assertion.
30
#27 thank you for some actual common sense.
31
There's a lot of hypocrisy on all sides of this issue. Mike Bloomberg has addressed hunting groups, during which he's called hunters, "The backbone of America," (I was present at one such gathering). On that score, Mr. Bloomberg is right, but so are home and business owners who use guns for self defense (the defense of life & PROPERTY).

WHY are guns the ONLY inanimate object blamed for crimes?

It doesn't make any sense.

We don’t blame cars for vehicular deaths…it’s bad drivers.

With guns, it’s bad/dysfunctional people, but lots of people don’t like the look of that conclusion (more on that later).

The truth is that hunters, home and business-owners rarely, if ever murder (self defense…defending life & PROPERTY isn't a crime), in fact, such self-defense deaths, are routinely blamed on the deceased, or wounded attacker by our legal system, as it is they who initiated the aggression.

Suicides and off-campus shootings that involve students DO NOT (according to law enforcement sources) count as "school shootings." It would be maliciously misleading to include them.

Crime stats clearly show that over 90% of all gun crimes are committed by repeat felons…the rest are suicides, a few domestic disputes, etc. Beyond that, upwards of 60% of those 90+% felonious gun crimes are committed by urban ethnics (blacks & Hispanics to be specific).

AND THAT’S the reason so many of us blame guns and NOT the dysfunctional people who use them. Too many dumb hyper-sensitive people don’t want to appear “racist.”

Truth is, facts are NEVER “racist.” NOT even when they make specific ethnic/racial groups look bad or dysfunctional.

One of the major polarizing factors in America isn't the problems facing us, but the competing ideas on how to combat those problems. It’s the “HOWS” that ultimately divide us.

Simplistic thinkers seem to see the best/only solution to gun violence as being much tighter restrictions on guns and ammunition, when in fact, that’s been proven wrong in the incubator of the world’s gun violence…the Philippines! That country’s government banned guns and the result was the proliferation of thousands of backyard gun shops….https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fna9WE...

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