CNN’s Jim Acosta Claims 1,552 Mass Public Shootings Since Sandy Hook

If CNN’s Jim Acosta is to be believed, there are so many mass public shootings in America that the media doesn’t even have time to cover them all.

Yesterday, he linked to a piece from the left-wing publication Vox, claiming that there have been at least 1,552 mass public shootings since Sandy Hook (where 28 were killed) in 2012. It’s a shocking statistic that would imply that there’s a mass public shooting nearly every day in America.

But how is one to define mass public shooting? You may have noticed that the death tally for all those mass public shootings sure seems unusually low – 1,552 mass shootings and only 1,767 killed? If mass public shooters are barely managing to kill more than one person in a shooting, is it really “mass?” That’s where the wounded come in.

There’s no official definition for mass public shooting, so the number of such shootings can vary widely depending on how you define them. For instance, define mass public shootings as an event where four or more people are killed, and you’ll find there are far fewer mass public shootings than defined as “four or more wounded.”

According to Breitbart,

it is important to note that he attempts to bolster this claim via information provided by a tracking site sponsored by gun controllers. That tracking site–the Gun Violence Archive–diverges from FBI definition of a mass shooting as four fatalities or more in one incident so as to include shootings in which no fatalities occur.
Other members of the left have been spewing similar numbers for years. At times, their claims have gotten so outlandish that members of their own circles have called them out for it.
For example, in December 2015 Breitbart News reported that Mother Jones’ editor Mark Follman called out leftists for claiming “355 mass shootings” in that calendar year alone. Follman published a column in the The New York Times, which said: “At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled 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.”
Note–using the actual FBI definition of mass shootings, Follman could only find four mass shootings for the entire year, yet leftists were claiming 355.

As for the correctly defined mass public shootings that remain (perhaps it would be appropriate to call the others “multiple victim shootings”), they do have one thing in common. The Crime Prevention Research Center analyzed all the mass public shootings in America from 1950 through July of 2016, and found that “98.4 percent of mass shootings have occurred on gun-free zones, with just 1.6 percent occurring where citizens are allowed to have firearms with them.”

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