If you’ve been anywhere around social media over the last week, you’ve probably seen this claim: there have been 18 school shootings already in 2018. Do you remember these? Does anyone?

The Lie

Ok. If none of us can remember these 18 school shootings, then how did they happen? Well, the number comes from Everytown Gun and Safety — a notorious anti-gun group. This number is so ridiculous that even the Trump hating, liberal Washington Post published an article condemning it. After that article, Everytown Gun and Safety revised their number to 17, which is still an obscene claim.

This number includes “shootings” that happened when no one was present at the schools. For instance, one of the events was when a man committed suicide in a parking lot of a school after midnight. Oh yeah, and that school had been closed for eight months. Most of the reported shootings are of this nature. Shots were fired, but no one was injured and the only person present at the school was the “shooter.”

If you’re curious what the real number is, it’s three. There have been three school shootings in 2018, and you probably remember each one. They were big news.

Even More Lies

But, you know how the left run media operates. This one lie fueled bigger, more dramatic lies. That culminated in a Hillary Clinton Tweet (because of course she can’t stay out of it) that claims there have been 230 school shootings since Sandy Hook. Now, that’s a huge number. Have we become so desensitized to this epidemic that we forgot hundreds of school shootings? No. We haven’t. This number also comes from Everytown Gun and Safety, and it is just as outrageous.

In reality, there have been 25 school shootings, not since Sandy Hook, but since 1999. That’s right. Including Columbine, there have been 25 fatal school shootings in 19 years. That is a horrific and tragic number, but it’s nothing at all like the five shootings a month that Hillary wants us to believe.

The truth is that Americans care about children, and each of us has a long memory for these terrible events. We don’t need to be fed inflated propaganda to be motivated to protect our children.

A Bit of Perspective

You already know that this is about gun control, but the extreme dichotomy reveals two different Americas. On one side, you have people who acknowledge the gravity of school shootings and continue to call for direct action to protect children. As insane as it sounds, they want to implement many of the same practices that have successfully protected our politicians for so long. What an idea.

On the other side, you have a group that does everything in their power to diminish each event. They make up extra stories, because 17 dead children isn’t dramatic enough for them. They have to make it seem like school shootings are a major part of a gun-crime epidemic. It’s the only way to justify their aims of disarming America.

The problem is that the gun-crime epidemic isn’t happening. We all know that overall gun crime has been in decline for decades, and that the decrease began when the assault weapons ban of the 90s expired. Even as tragic as each school shooting is, it is amazingly rare. There are roughly 100,000 public schools in the US. There have been 25 shootings in 19 years. That means an American child is 20 times more likely to be struck by lightning than even be present at a school shooting. That number is also true for random massacres that aren’t on school grounds.

Along those same lines, lightning strikes are more common in America than gun accidents (something the left seems to think happens frequently). Overall, there are only two components of gun crime that actually are at epidemic levels: gang wars and suicide. On the right, we’ve been making suggestions for reducing gang crime for years, and recent statistics show that less-strict gun laws and tougher immigration both correlate with massive reductions in gang crime.

On the other hand, suicide is still two-thirds of all gun deaths in America. It is at epidemic levels, and it almost always involves handguns (something the left hasn’t mentioned in any of their calls for gun control). Suicide kills more of our children than mad shooters, more black men than cops, and more Americans than any other form of malice. It’s the number 10 leading cause of death in this country, and somehow, the left thinks that this isn’t a mental health issue. It seems the biggest epidemic of all is one of outright stupidity.