PolitiFact: Broad definition of school shootings is misleading

After an armed Oregon high school freshman recently injured a teacher, killed a student and killed himself, a striking statistic began circulating on the Internet. It said that at least 74 school shootings had occurred since December 2012, when the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., left 28 people dead.

The statistic came from Everytown for Gun Safety, a group founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and gun-control advocate Shannon Watts. That comes out to more than one school shooting per week.

Numerous media outlets reported the figure, and the number spread widely through social media.

But it also attracted criticism.

We decided to sift through the numbers ourselves.

How Everytown counted 74 incidents

To its credit, Everytown provided details on each of the 74 shootings, including the date, city and location. The group also clearly laid out its methodology. These make it possible for the critics — and us — to look at its calculations.

Everytown’s definition of “school shooting” is relatively broad. The criteria go beyond what many people would consider “school shootings” — incidents in which a student or an intruder enters a school and fires at innocent students and staff.

Here’s a description of the group’s methodology:

Incidents were classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds, as documented in publicly reported news accounts. This includes assaults, homicides, suicides and accidental shootings.

This definition allows for incidents that don’t typically call to mind the term “school shooting” — for example, a case in which a man unaffiliated with Alogna High/Middle School in Iowa killed himself in the school’s parking lot in the middle of the night.

Clearly, it is difficult to draw lines. The Everytown list did not include the recent and highly publicized shooting spree in Isla Vista, Calif. In that case, the shooter was a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he targeted other students. Seven people died, but the shooting wasn’t technically on campus, so it didn’t make the list.

Our breakdown

We did our best to sort the shootings into five categories:

In all, these 74 incidents resulted in 38 deaths and 53 injuries.

Only about 14 percent of the shootings mirrored Columbine and Sandy Hook.

In addition, almost half — 35 — occurred at a college or university rather than a k-12 school. This clashes with the imagery invoked by the line in the chart’s introduction, that “we should feel secure in sending our children to school — comforted by the knowledge that they’re safe.”

We asked James Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, for some perspective. He pointed to the 2013 “Indicators of School Crime and Safety” report compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There were about 45 school-associated violent deaths (not just by guns) at elementary and secondary schools each year between the 1992 and 2010 school years, according to the report. The highest annual total was 63 deaths in 2006-07, while the lowest was 31 in 2010-11.

In other words, Fox said, the number of gun deaths documented by Everytown over the past year and a half are not out of the ordinary.

Is it misleading?

The experts we consulted agreed that Everytown’s broad definition of “school shooting” could be misleading, encouraging them to assume that there have been 74 incidents similar to Columbine or Sandy Hook.

While the Everytown definition is certainly one way of calculating it, there is such a range of motivations, degrees of planning and outcomes that it ceases to be an especially useful measurement, said Jay Corzine, a University of Central Florida sociology professor.

Everytown has countered the criticism by saying that focusing too closely on Sandy Hook-like incidents unfairly diminishes the full extent of the dangers to students and staff posed by guns in or near schools.

Corzine prefers the designation used by the New York Police Department, among others — “active shooter,” which limits the list to incidents that occur during school hours, involving a firearm discharged with the intent to kill or injure others on school grounds or while in transit on a school vehicle.

Corzine said he sees some value in Everytown’s calculations — but also pitfalls.

On the one hand, “they are a valid indicator of the ease with which firearms enter the school environment in the United States compared to other highly developed nations.” But “it is misleading to use the 74 school shootings in a context that explicitly or implicitly equates them with Sandy Hook.”

Our ruling

A statistic calculated by Everytown for Gun Safety said that there have been 74 “school shootings in America since Sandy Hook.”

The group’s figure is accurate only if you use a broad definition of “school shooting” that includes such incidents as suicides, accidents and spillover from adjacent criminal activity. The figure has some value in quantifying the proximity of guns to school campuses, but the group makes a significant stretch by tying the statistic so closely to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook.

The statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.