I understand that many perceive CNN as a slanted source of information. But this article is to the point and lets give credit where it is due. They clearly state that most school shootings are not "mass shootings"
But they happened on school grounds, at school sponsored events. Whether or not they were current students is irrelevant. The kid who shot up the school in Florida was no longer a student there.
I don't know exactly what it means, but found it interesting to note that according to the data predominately black school shootings happen late in the school day and at predominately white schools they happen in the morning. My guess is that the morning shootings are planned, while the afternoon shootings are more the result of an argument. And there are school related activities going on until 7-11 PM on most school days. I coached for 30 years and there are a surprising number of teachers, coaches and students still on campus very late on most days.
Didn't read that at all.
Mental illness is a factor, but where I strongly agree with the article is the lack of coping skills with kids today. Face to face interaction and problem solving are becoming a lost art. Kids would rather communicate via text than face to face.
That is one of the major points of the CNN article.
There isn't a single word in the CNN article blaming guns for the problem. In fact the only time guns are mentioned is to point out that the rights of law abiding gun owners should be protected.
You're reading WAAY too much into this. If the exact article were written word for word from another source you'd see it completely differently.
Nope, I would not and am not. Look, it is not your fault that CNN did a shoddy job of it. When a story is based on the data, the data presented and the story should mesh. They do not. Second, as someone familiar with school violence, criminal justice, etc, when you only present violence coming from a firearm (and include bb guns as such) then you are missing a large percentage of the day to day violence in today's schools. Take your average University or school, the feds require schools to report crimes on campus. Here is an example report
https://safety-security.uchicago.edu/police/data_information/violent_crime_report/
Here is something not mentioned AT ALL by CNN in a report on school violence,
"School Crime Trends
Violent victimization among students largely has mirrored the national decrease in violent victimization over the past two decades. Student-reported violent victimization at school has decreased 75% since 1995, from a rate of 75.6 violent victimizations per 1,000 students to 18.9 per 1,000 in 2014. Serious violent victimization at school has also decreased by 69% since 1995, from a rate of 11.5 serious violent victimizations per 1,000 students, to 3.6"
Source: Uncle Sam at
https://ovc.ncjrs.gov/ncvrw2017/images/en_artwork/Fact_Sheets/2017NCVRW_SchoolCrime_508.pdf
and this from the Obama era DOJ,
"School shootings are frightening and make headlines. However, today’s students are less likely to be threatened or injured with a weapon, including a gun, at school than they were 10 years ago. Since 1992, the percentage of youth homicides occurring at school has not changed, comprising less than 3 percent of the total number of youth homicides. Current data do not report on whether the number of school shootings has increased, but student weapon carrying and weapon-related injuries have decreased."
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/251173.pdf
This is a statewide report from VA on k12 school safety incidents and there is little to suppose VA is radically different than most states,
"Weapon Incidents (Table 5, p. 22)
A total of 2,587 weapons incidents were reported in 2010-2011, representing 1.46 percent
of all incidents reported.
The category of knife possession (blade with more than 3 inches)
represented 32.24 percent (834) of all weapons incidents, and the category of other
weapons was under 25 percent [19.68% (509)]. Incidents reported as “other weapons”
involve instruments or objects to inflict harm on another person that do not fall within other
offense definitions. Possession of razor blades/box cutters/knife (less than 3 inches)
constituted 21.49 percent (556) and possession of toy or look-alike guns constituted 9.86
percent (255) of weapons incidents. Constituting a little more than six percent of weapons
incidents was possession of fireworks/firecrackers/stink bombs (158).
BB guns constituted
4.52 percent (117), ammunition 2.82 percent (73), possession of chemical substance 0.81
percent (21) and
handguns 0.81 percent (21)."
http://www.pen.k12.va.us/statistics...iscipline_crime_violence/10_annual_report.pdf
I am a bit lazy today due to other business but I found all of these links in less than about 5 minutes using a bog standard browser search. It took me about 15 minutes to derive all of the info above and put it into this post. It is actually taking me longer to type my comments than it did to find this. So, we see that CNN's story is seriously incomplete, focuses on firearms, adds in their database bb guns which from VA seems to be about six times more prevalent in possession than firearms, and so on. If they were simply incompetent, they would have cut and pasted from the relevant government reports that at the top of a google search. Instead, they create their own "database" wow from a lexis news article search and a few reports, leave out any context of who was charged, were they schoolchildren, what was the general causes of the shootings, etc. To take the time and effort that CNN did, they are hiding by omission that school violence in general is down by a massive amount from the 1990's and those using weapons are down as well. They are hiding the fact that many of their "school" shootings may not have been school related at all but merely normal urban violence. Furthermore, they are ignoring both gang affiliations and drug dealing of which quite a few folks as students engage in. Gangs and drug involvement as users or sellers involve quite a heightened risk of violence either as a perp or as a victim. They also mention as you cited that SOME, not all, occurred at or around school events but their data does not say anything about that. My suspicion then is that it is rather low. The inference is also that the violence is done by students but that is not necessarily so--e.g. CT murderer was NOT a student for example. Thus, any shootings by anyone at anytime that occurred on loosely defined school premises were counted in the database without distinction in that data.
In this case, this is a textbook example of how the news media manipulates people into their agenda by omitting facts and data that do not support their thesis. The cruder web sources use clickbait titles and usually cite some junk research commissioned by gun banners, CNN does not quite do that here but instead presents a thoroughly misleading compilation article that leads people to conclude wow there is a lot of school violence and something needs to be done. Coincidentally, all of the data presented is gun violence which is relatively rare instead of other kinds of violence.
What if for example, I included knifings on school premises and there was roughly 10 times the number of shooting victims--wouldn't you conclude that knives were a more serious problem than handguns.
I actually review articles based on methodology as part of my job and my own research has in the past involved significant statistical methods and yes it has been published.
In my professional opinion, their data presented does not support the text as I actually pulled their "database" into excel, did a few sorts, etc. What jumped out initially is that many of these shootings occurred in urban areas and significantly after hours. What you are reading about the school events, etc. is not present in the data itself. All the dataset records is the location, the date, the school, the number killed, injured, etc., race, urban/local, and time. No notifications as to charges, disposition, etc. exist in their database nor any reasons for the shootings. Notably to make the data more difficult to sort, the person making it did not use a 24 hr clock or a separate AM/PM indicator for time data which is std. for this kind of research.
Journalists and journalism exists to "make a difference"--not to report the news. Read it accordingly.
