The 18-school-shootings-in-2018 number widely making the rounds after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Florida has been vastly inflated, The Washington Post reported.
Non-profit organization Everytown for Gun Safety released the statistic shortly after the Wednesday shooting, the Post noted, and it didn’t take long before political figures, celebrities and national media latched onto the number which was also widely circulated across social media.
The Post disputed the number, saying Everytown for Gun Safety included incidents of gunfire “that are not really school shootings,” and cited several examples.
One incident, listed as the year’s first school shooting, involved a 31-year-old man who killed himself while he was parked outside a Michigan elementary school that had been closed for seven months.
Other examples included security officers accidentally discharging their weapons when no students were around and shootings in school parking lots at night longer after schools have been dismissed.
As CNBC reported, the conflict arises in what counts as a “school shooting,” which Everytown for Gun Safety defines as “any time a firearm discharges a live round inside a school building or on a school campus or grounds,”
An incident doesn’t have to result in injury or death to constitute as a school shooting, per the group.
According to Everytown for Gun Safety, there have been an astonishing 300 school shootings in the U.S since 2013, with an average of one occurring a week.
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