Narrative BUSTED? NPR (!) just shot some MASSIVE holes in a major gun control talking point

Sarah D | 1:03 PM on August 28, 2018

This seems … newsworthy:

The federal government said schools reported 235 shootings in one school year.

But an NPR investigation finds that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. https://t.co/5AxSOK20fG pic.twitter.com/VHtBN28wQ6

— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) August 28, 2018

This is interesting…NPR reached out to the 200+ schools that reportedly had school shootings in 2015 and found that more than two-thirds of these government-reported incidents never happened. https://t.co/k1yg0KTd55 pic.twitter.com/KDipG8ytJL

— Natalie Johnson (@nataliejohnsonn) August 28, 2018

More from NPR:

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.

But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.

We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.

In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries.

“When we’re talking about such an important and rare event, [this] amount of data error could be very meaningful,” says Deborah Temkin, a researcher and program director at Child Trends.