When it comes to school shootings, the progressive left’s favorite gun-control cheerleaders at Everytown for Gun Safety have taken their creative liberties to new heights. According to Everytown, any time a bullet so much as grazes a building on school grounds, it’s a school shooting. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s their actual definition.
The Hill recently highlighted the discrepancies between gun-control groups in defining school shootings. Education Week, for instance, limits its count to incidents that occur during school hours or at school-sponsored events. Their tally for 2024? Thirty-nine. Everytown, however, pads the stats by counting incidents where a gun is discharged on or into school property at any time, no matter the circumstances. By their definition, a stray bullet hitting an empty school building at 3 a.m. counts the same as a mass shooting. With that generous accounting, Everytown reported a staggering 219 school shootings in 2024.
Everytown’s website openly admits its methodology, boasting about tracking every firearm discharge “inside or into a school building or on or onto a school campus or grounds.” That includes incidents where no one is injured, much less killed. They lean on the K-12 Shooting Database, a source that cheerfully logs anything from accidental discharges to someone waving a gun around. The result is a bloated, misleading statistic designed to terrify suburban moms and bolster calls for more restrictive gun laws.
This isn’t the first time Everytown has been caught exaggerating. Back in 2014, they released a list of 100 “school shootings” in the two years following the Sandy Hook tragedy. Breitbart News exposed the list as a patchwork of non-school shootings, false incidents, and accidental discharges. But don’t expect the media to give that the same coverage they give to Everytown’s inflated numbers.
The left’s playbook here is obvious: sensationalize the data to push their anti-gun agenda. Never mind the facts, or that responsible gun owners bear the brunt of these overreaching policies. What matters to groups like Everytown is narrative, not nuance. And while they’re busy turning statistics into propaganda, conservatives are standing up for the Second Amendment and the truth.
This is why Republicans must continue to push back against the left’s disingenuous tactics. Americans deserve real solutions to school safety, not scare tactics and cooked numbers. Responsible gun ownership, better school security, and addressing the root causes of violence will do far more to protect children than Everytown’s endless calls for gun control. It’s time to expose their agenda for what it is: a shameless attempt to exploit tragedy for political gain.