The mainstream media wants you to believe that there have been 355 mass shootings this year alone.
When you lose a major progressive outlet like Mother Jones, your argument is about as bogus as it can be. From the New York Times:
How Many Mass Shootings Are There, Really?
On Wednesday, a Washington Post article announced that “The San Bernardino shooting is the second mass shooting today and the 355th this year.” Vox, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, this newspaper and others reported similar statistics. Grim details from the church in Charleston, a college classroom in Oregon and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado are still fresh, but you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015.
At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.
What explains the vastly different count? The answer is that there is no official definition for “mass shooting.” Almost all of the gun crimes behind the much larger statistic are less lethal and bear little relevance to the type of public mass murder we have just witnessed again. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others. Or that a late-night shooting on a street in Savannah, Ga., yesterday that injured three and killed one is in the same category as the madness that just played out in Southern California.
Mark Follman is the author and a big Thank You going out to him for some rational reporting of actual facts - speaking Truth to Power as it were...
Not mentioned is that the 351 non-mass murders are 98% black on black gang or drug related killings - the type that the mainstream media will not report because it makes the narrative of the war on poverty and the narrative of the welfare state look bad.
Finally, something to remember is that the San Bernardino shooters did obtain their rifles legally. They then proceeded to violate State and Federal Law by converting one of them to full-automatic operation. They also added extended capacity magazines, the ability to swap magazines on the fly - both in direct violation of California State Law. They also built IEDs and pipe bombs in direct violation of Federal and State Laws. This was not a case of someone getting angry, going home and returning with their grampa's pistol - this was planned well in advance -- premeditated.
