If there was ever a time when America needed Hillary Clinton — and it’s debatable whether such a time existed — it certainly wasn’t in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting.
Yet, there she was — and lying as always.
After the shootings, the 2016 Democrat presidential candidate issued a series of tweets supporting the typical amorphous “gun control” agenda of the left, all without any actual policy proposals but plenty of weepy “we can do better” rhetoric.
Now is the time to listen to the students, teachers, and parents demanding that we end this carnage once and for all with gun safety laws that keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 16, 2018
One tweet, however, was particularly outrageous — mostly because it was pretty much an outright lie.
This week we lost 17 Americans in Parkland – the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012. Since then, 438 people have been shot and 138 killed in over 230 school shootings. That’s 5 school shootings every month, 16 of which classify as “mass shootings.”
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 16, 2018
“This week we lost 17 Americans in Parkland — the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012,” Clinton tweeted Sunday.
“Since then, 438 people have been shot and 138 killed in over 230 school shootings. That’s 5 school shootings every month, 16 of which classify as ‘mass shootings.’”
Note that last sentence, which may seem a bit ambiguous or confusing to you.
As The Washington Post notes, that statistic is from Everytown for Gun Safety, a heavily astroturfed, left-wing, gun control group. And its statistics on school shootings were so misleading that even the WaPo — hardly a den of covert NRA activity — wrote an article about the group’s statistics bluntly titled, “No, there haven’t been 18 school shootings in 2018. That number is flat wrong.”
“The figure originated with Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group, co-founded by Michael Bloomberg, that works to prevent gun violence and is most famous for its running tally of school shootings,” the newspaper reported.
“A tweet by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) including the claim had been liked more than 45,000 times by Thursday evening, and one from political analyst Jeff Greenfield had cracked 126,000. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted it, too, as did performers Cher and Alexander William and actors Misha Collins and Albert Brooks. News organizations — including MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, Time, MSN, the BBC, the New York Daily News and HuffPost — also used the number in their coverage.”
However, as The Washington Post noted, “Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counted as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.
“Also listed on the organization’s site is an incident from Jan. 20, when at 1 a.m. a man was shot at a sorority event on the campus of Wake Forest University. A week later, as a basketball game was being played at a Michigan high school, someone fired several rounds from a gun in the parking lot. No one was injured, and it was past 8 p.m., well after classes had ended for the day, but Everytown still labeled it a school shooting.”
Everytown’s definition of a school shooting — “any time a firearm discharges a live round inside a school building or on a school campus or grounds” — is obviously deceptive. And Hillary Clinton obviously knows that.
According to USA Today, the actual number of fatal school shooting incidents since Columbine in 1999 is 25 — certainly no small number, but nowhere near 230 school shootings since 2012.
After moments like Parkland, it’s important we have serious discussions about who we are and who we want to be as a nation. It doesn’t help when demagogues like Clinton use numbers that are outright lies to advance her agenda and maintain her relevancy.
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