When the group Everytown for Gun Safety came out with its statistic last week that there have been 74 school shootings since the Newtown massacre, the MRC knew it had to shoot it down, as it were.
In a June 11 MRC item, Matthew Balan dismissed Everytown for Gun Safety as a “pro-gun control group” founded by Michael Bloomberg, taking refuge in a conservative blog’s insistence that gang violence and gun suicides don’t count as “school shootings.”
A June 12 NewsBusters post by Tom Blumer called the group’s number a “falsehood” and touted how CNN allegedly debunked the group’s figure by focusing only on “situations similar to the violence in Oregon — a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school.” As Media Matters notes, this follows the strange right-wing logic, articulated by right-wing writer Charles C. Johnson, that “It’s not a school shooting when someone goes and shoots a specific person on campus. It’s a shooting that happens to take place at school.”
In a June 13 item, Kristine Marsh attacked the group’s purportedly “false data,” as if people killed at school by means other than mass shootings didn’t really die.