Vin Suprynowicz

I see where the Victim Disarmament gang have been up to their old tricks, caught red-handed ginning up bogus statistics to try and convince low-information voters that America’s government schools are now little more than shooting galleries.

(“But if only we could ban the guns!” they cry, ignoring the curious shortage of attacks on police stations.)

The domestic policy goal of financier and propagandist Michael Bloomberg, who finally stopped dodging term limits to step down as Mayor of New York this year (and who now works for U.N. chief Ban Ki-Moon proselytizing the established state religion of Global Warming), is to make sure every American has the same right to a self-defense weapon as the average civilian of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union (which is to say, none.) And thanks to his deep pockets ($34 billion), many now consider Bloomberg’s “Everytown for Gun Safety” group to be the nation’s largest and most effective Victim Disarmament lobby, outpacing even the time-honored Brady Bunch.

Most importantly, Mr. Bloomberg has used some of that loot to position himself as a “news supplier.” As he feeds information to them through Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg View, and Bloomberg Businessweek (the magazine he bought from McGraw-Hill in 2009) — and since his statist gun-control agenda matches theirs, anyway — the nation’s big newspapers and television networks see little need to check out anything Mr. Bloomberg sends them.

If you or I were to send out a news release ballyhooing the thousands of lives saved each year by law-abiding gun owners getting the drop on criminals, would they play it on the front page? I don’t think so. Even though it happens to be true, they’d be more likely to say: “Who is this guy? Sounds like someone with an axe to grind. Probably a lot of stuff taken out of context. Throw it away.”

But when Bloomberg’s “Everytown for Gun Safety” in early June sent out a purported list of 74 American school shootings since the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in 2012, the national media ate it up. The Huffington Post even made up a map with 74 little flags (none in gun-heavy Idaho or Montana, how odd), which proceeded to go viral.

And guess what none of the media did? None of them checked it out
But an independent journalist did.

HE LOOKED THEM UP

“One independent journalist single-handedly eviscerated an infographic that was created by Everytown for USA, a pro-gun control group founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and circulated on social media Tuesday,” the Daily Caller reported June 11.

“In the wake of a shooting at a high school in Oregon that left two dead, including the gunman, Everytown circulated a map which showed 74 school shootings that have taken place in the U.S. since Dec. 2012, when Adam Lanza killed 26 at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut,” the Daily Caller continued.

“By using the Sandy Hook massacre as a frame of reference, the Everytown map left the impression that the shootings included on it were similar, claimed Charles Johnson, the freelance journalist who critiqued the graphic.”

What sophisticated technique did Johnson use? He simply looked up the 74 “school shootings” online. “By my count,” wrote Johnson, “fewer than 7 of the 74 school shootings listed by Everytown are real mass shootings.”

One 2013 shooting in San Leandro, California was related to a late-night dice game being played in an elementary school parking lot, hours after every child had gone home, Johnson found.

Others included a public suicide, shootings related to gang wars and gang initiations (including a gang member who accidentally shot herself in the thigh), a dispute over a Nintendo Wii video game console, and a lovers’ spat involving a high school principal.

Johnson couldn’t find “any evidence that supposed ‘school shooting’ at Grambling, LA on Jan, 28, 2014 . . . even occurred.”

Just as the gun-grabbers have long lumped into their lists of “children killed by gun violence” hunting accidents and suicides, 18-year-old felons shot by police during commission of crimes, and 19-year-olds shooting each other in fights over drug distribution turf, the Bloomberg gang even included as a “school shooting” the following incident, reported Jan. 30 by USA Today under the headline “Shooting on Fla. Campus may have been self-defense.

“PALM BAY, Fla. — A man in his 20s was in fair condition Thursday after he was shot in a fight on the Palm Bay campus of Eastern Florida State College, authorities say.

“The shooter, whom two men were beating, was treated and released from an area hospital, according to spokeswoman Yvonne Martinez of Palm Bay Police.

“Police say Amado Contreras, 25, and his 24-year old brother, Landyer, attacked Landrick Hamilton, 24, with a pool cue in front of the college’s main building. During the fight, Hamilton got a gun from his car at about 1:50 p.m. ET and fired one shot, hitting Amado Contreras.

“Hamilton has no prior history of discipline problems at the college, which was known as Brevard Community College until last year. All three men are claiming self-defense.”

The shooting came eight weeks after a Florida appeals court struck down a regulation on another state university campus that banned students from storing guns in their cars. Florida law prevents anyone from possessing or exhibiting guns on school campuses, including university and college campuses. But the same law says the ban doesn’t apply to guns in cars.

So wait: Florida schools are already virtual “gun-free zones,” but the Bloomberg gang thinks the solution is to ban guns where they’re already banned? Or is their argument that we need to ban firearms so men like Landrick Hamilton won’t be able to defend themselves against multiple assailants beating them with pool cues?

CRIME RATES PLUMMET

CNN was apparently so upset at being hoodwinked by the “74 school shootings” hokum that they returned to the topic several times, including a June 12 segment that admitted school shootings are actually NOT on the rise.

“What I find remarkable about this particular instance,” wrote John Hayward at HumanEvents.com on June 13, “is how swiftly and easily so much of Everytown’s propaganda was debunked by Charles C. Johnson — who, as you can see from his Twitter messages, basically just took the list and started Googling, guided by his instinct that the gun-control group’s claim was fishy. Every large media organization should have done that, before reporting the press release as ‘news.’ . . . But what good is a research team if everyone says ‘This supports what we already believe, and the people who sent it are “good guys,” so we’ll just run with it’?

“One might suppose Everytown would be worried about the risk to its credibility,” Mr. Hayward continues. “But they also accomplished important goals by putting their propaganda on a wide media stage, cross-linked by countless Web sites . . . very few of which will carry the debunking.

“After President Obama was busted for using phony statistics to push his ‘pay gap’ narrative, there was much talk about his adviser David Plouffe’s theory of ‘stray voltage,’ which holds that . . . it doesn’t matter if your 74 school shootings or 77-cent pay gap for women is nonsense, as long the controversy gets people talking about shootings and pay gaps.

“Does the gun-control movement ever tell the truth about anything?”

In fact, as Lucy Steigerwald, formerly of Reason magazine, points out at original.antiwar.com, “Homicide, rape, assault, and every other type of crime has plunged in the last two decades. Between 1993 and 2010, the gun homicide rate was halved (pewsocialtrends.org, May 7, 2013.)

Ms. Steigerwald says no one is sure why. In fact, one major factor is the aging of the populace -– in an economy where school and employment laws have turned children into an economic liability instead of an economic asset, Americans bear fewer children, the population ages, and old folks commit fewer violent crimes. A second major factor is the inconvenient fact that many more potential victims are now well-armed.

Ms. Steigerwald also makes the excellent point that the gun-grabbers reveal their true orientation — totalitarian -– by always banging their drums to disarm CIVILIANS, but rarely complaining about the fact that “After every police shooting — just or otherwise — the cliches roll out from the PR flaks: ‘officer safety is paramount’, ‘split-second decision’, ‘reached for waistband’ and ‘our officers felt threatened.’ To question whether an individual tasked with legal lethal force should have waited to make sure the teen-age graffiti artist running away or the peaceful protester was a real threat is to not care whether these brave officers live or die. . . .”

The New York Times recently published a good update on the state of militarized police forces, thanks in part to the Pentagon’s 1033 program. Author Mike Apuzzo wrote on June 8 that during Obama’s presidency “Police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” Since 1990, more than 4.2 billion dollars in gear have been passed out, mostly to police departments in areas with little crime.

That’s supposed to make us feel safe, apparently . . . while we should all run around shrieking like hens over some poor man racing to his car to get his legally stored handgun to fend off two guys beating him with pool cues?

Vin Suprynowicz writes from Nevada. He’s the author of “Send in the Waco Killers” and the novel “The Black Arrow.” His next novel, “The Testament of James,” is due this fall.