The school shootings that weren't.

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Is anyone here really surprised?

Aside from the fact that the mainstream media routinely gets away with this, and that most Americans actually believe what's reported?
 
Is anyone here really surprised?

Aside from the fact that the mainstream media routinely gets away with this, and that most Americans actually believe what's reported?

The point is that the mainstream media (if that is what you call NPR) exposed the anti-gun misinformation. So, yes, I suppose many on both sides find it surprising. And NPR lead many newscasts with this story.
 
I get the idea that some people didn't bother to read the article, and made assumptions.

Yep. I sent the link to the article to three people I know and two of them completely misread who was at fault for publishing a false report about school shootings. They couldn't even read the headline correctly due to a predetermined bias against NPR on their part.
 
The government retains it’s power thru a balance of carrot and stick. If you think of the magnitude of the task of controlling a huge mass of people to get them to behave like you want them to behave, bending or breaking the truth is a necessary tool. We all know that regardless of party or philosophy, all groups bend and break the truth to get their way. There is no such thing as absolute truth in hunan thought, there is only how one sees the world - that is the truth. Nothing should ever surprise anyone when it comes to human behavior. All you can do is make sure that you are comfortable with your beliefs and be open to changing your mind - that is the best we can offer.
 
I wouldn't call it "predetermined". After a long time period of steady and consistant results I would call it "reliable".

I, too, was completely taken aback by the identity of the reporting agency when I read it. Let us not pretent that NPR is some totally just non-slanted news group. I maybe hard, but I don't give "atta boys" for the single time they didn't behave like a propaganda mouth piece.

Bending and breaking the truth is fine. Just don't be angry when I do it to you, right? It's alright to lie under oath as long as that is my version of it?
Nope. Lies are lies. Humans are imperfect, but I completely reject the notion that it is fine to lie to certain humans to manipulate them into an action. Else why is it wrong to lie to an emergency operator?
Hitler did that, Mulas are doing it now. It is not their "version" of truth that is the problem, it is their lying.
(And now I know not to trust what Steve says.:scrutiny::))

Having thirty year old gang bangers kill themselves on a street in front of a school at night is not a school shooting. That is a lie. Not a version of truth.
Hopefully this was not some random act of juornalism and they keep looking for the real story.

I won't hold my breath...;)
 
The point is that the mainstream media (if that is what you call NPR) exposed the anti-gun misinformation. So, yes, I suppose many on both sides find it surprising. And NPR lead many newscasts with this story.
I don't consider NPR as part of the mainstream media, really -- I have found over the years it is not nearly as biased toward the liberal agenda as many have accused it of being.

I was attempting to refer to the fact that (1) our educational system ironically seems collectively incapable of understanding, and can't answer, simple survey questions which in turn (2) leads the mainstream media (which itself has helped facilitate the downward spiral of our country's once-proud public education system) to report and for years perpetuate random data ("statistics") as fact in support of its anti-gun agenda.
 
I was not surprised that the data was faked to exaggerate school shootings so they could argue for more gun control.

Was WAS surprised by how much. The truth is that school shootings are much, much more rare than we were told.
 
I'm not sure the data were "faked" here, but the numbers were inflated by over-reporting. Whether that was intentional on the part of either the reporting parties (various school systems) or the compiling/requesting party (the DoE OCR)... hard to know for sure. Simple incompetence could also explain it... and confirmation bias on the part of the OCR personnel might have prevented a critical, skeptical examination.

But people credulously accept all kinds of stuff.
 
I'm not sure the data were "faked" here, but the numbers were inflated by over-reporting. Whether that was intentional on the part of either the reporting parties (various school systems) or the compiling/requesting party (the DoE OCR)... hard to know for sure. Simple incompetence could also explain it... and confirmation bias on the part of the OCR personnel might have prevented a critical, skeptical examination.

But people credulously accept all kinds of stuff.

Actually, the evidence is so damning that it is almost certain that they intentionally inflated the data.

"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."

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

NPR even called schools that shootings supposedly occurred, only to find out that there was never an incident. In one there was no shooting in the 30 years that the principal had worked, but the Feds said there was...

And it wasn't only NPR that did the investigating: "A separate investigation by the ACLU of Southern California also was able to confirm fewer than a dozen of the incidents in the government's report, while 59 percent were confirmed errors."

"Less than a dozen"; i.e. 11.

Two independent organizations coming up with the same number.

I suspect that a LOT of the "gun crime" in the country is just made up to help anti-Second Amendment legislation.
 
Actually, the evidence is so damning that it is almost certain that they intentionally inflated the data.

Who is the "they"? The DoE or the reporting schools? Did you read the parts of the story where schools were confused about what and how to report?

The number was so far off from reality that it should have raised skepticism and prompted follow up before the data was released. It didn't. Is that because the data was "helpful" to the causes of the people at the DoE? Or simply because they had an expectation that the data would show a lot of previously un-reported incidents, and when the numbers were big, they thought "yep, that's what I thought all along!"?

I tend to think simple confirmation bias combined with a mistaken starting belief/assumption that the numbers are very high is sufficient to explain this one. You have to remember, anyone reading liberal-ish press sources has been deluged since 2013 with the following "facts":
  • The U.S. has extraordinary levels of gun violence.
  • Congress has blocked research into it and how to prevent it.
  • Many types of shootings (such as law enforcement shootings of suspects) is either untracked or tracked sporadically and in a way guaranteed to under-report.
  • School shootings are a huge crisis/risk in America right now.
These are all somewhat misleading, but with just enough truth in them to be repeated and believed very sincerely by many "neutral" observers. If you are at the DoE and go into this primed with the bullet point sorta-truths listed above, you would find very high numbers of reported incidents to be totally credible... even though someone should have questioned this stuff.
 
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Who is the "they"? The DoE or the reporting schools? Did you read the parts of the story where schools were confused about what and how to report?
The Department of Education compiled the data.

And if schools, supposedly educated people, couldn't figure out the question then we are in really big trouble.
 
This is a bizarre thread. The Republican justice department produces an overstatement of school shootings that a 'liberal' newsgroup challenges, and finds support for 'our' position, yet people do nothing but criticize. It makes no sense!
It wasn't the Republican Justice Department. It was the Department of Education, with data from 2015-16.
 
The Department of Education compiled the data.

And if schools, supposedly educated people, couldn't figure out the question then we are in really big trouble.

Writing questions that people all over the country will interpret and answer in consistent ways is very hard. If you don't know this, then you've never studied polling or other forms of data collection. This is a routine challenge in all kinds of areas.

For instance, in my state, hospitals are required to fill out certain annual surveys about finances and services delivered and other metrics. These surveys are required by the state, and the state tracks the data. It is very clear, if you know what you are looking at, that several large hospitals interpret several of the questions rather differently than some of their competitors and, therefore, report different data. And that's not for something where the agency collecting the data has a bias or ideological angle.

This stuff is harder than you assume. Again, simple incompetence is an adequate explanation here. Was there more? Was there malice? Perhaps. But I don't think we can necessarily infer it from the information in the story.

In any event, it is a demonstrated weakness of "government study of gun violence."
 
I'm going to toss in this link to a self-critical op-ed published by a newspaper last year. In it, they describe how they credulously reported some similar data about children's average exposure to gun violence which also turned out to be grossly inflated - again, primarily through people expecting certain things to be bad, finding data that said things were bad, and then credulously accepting those numbers even though a skeptical reading would have raised questions:

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/...g-one-unintentionally-misinformed-public-guns
 
NPR is pretty accurate about reporting news. Their flaw is the commentary they issue with the news. But that is not unique to them, many other outlets on all sides of the spectrum do the same thing. Part of being informed is differentiating between fact and opinion.

I'm going to disagree with ATLDave a bit, making a standard question that is answerable in a consistent manner isn't hard at all. But it does require that you define the vocabulary first. I pose the question here: "How many people reading this thread have an astrolabe in their shoe at the time of the reading?" The question is meaningless if you do not read the thread, know what an astrolabe is, or wear shoes. But when you define the term (school shooting in this case) it's a simple question. "Have you had a school shooting?" Refer to the official definition of "School shooting" and answer appropriately. However, I think I recall the story stating that the survey attempted to define the term within the survey. Not an effective strategy for clear communication.

Occam's Razor supports incompetence as being the cause of confusion. But I will not entirely dismiss the idea of intentional ambiguity used to inflate numbers just yet.

In any event, good news that we have not had hundreds of school shootings. Bad news that the idea has been cemented in the public mind.
 
I don't consider NPR as part of the mainstream media, really -- I have found over the years it is not nearly as biased toward the liberal agenda as many have accused it of being.

I was attempting to refer to the fact that (1) our educational system ironically seems collectively incapable of understanding, and can't answer, simple survey questions which in turn (2) leads the mainstream media (which itself has helped facilitate the downward spiral of our country's once-proud public education system) to report and for years perpetuate random data ("statistics") as fact in support of its anti-gun agenda.

I've found this to be true, as well.

Probably has to do with the target audience, as well. A lot of the programs on NPR, for example, have great appeal to people with conservative views, even if they may be directed by people with liberal views/politics themselves.

Consider A Prairie Home Companion, by Garrison Keillor, for example. (Recently removed from NPR, though). It's a show very much in a conservative setting, with mostly conservative characters, but directed by someone very much a liberal...with liberal slants in the show, as well.

Like anything else...I'll find stuff I like and dislike about it.
 
I have posted before how I believe NPR is one of the better news sources and I agree with the previous comment, they are good at reporting but some of there reporters and announcers aren’t very good at recognizing there own city or liberal biases. I am often frustrated by that even when it’s a point of view I agree with.
I do think that some NPR producers or editors have realized they got a little caught up in their anti gun bias after Parkland and offended some listeners. They seem to be trying to compensate lately in the other direction.
This article is an example. They also had an article recently about an attempted ban on school shooting sports in New York where they actually went to the rural New York schools and talked to participants. It actually came out sounding like the ban was just city people being unreasonably hysterical.
 
chicharrones wrote:
"One of the problems is that if a shooting is not on school grounds, but near a school, the media will still put a "school shooting" headline on the story."

And it may still be a school shooting.

When I was in high school, a dispute erupted between two groups (it would not be proper to call them "gangs") on school grounds that escalated to the point that both went for their guns. One group ran away and got into a car. The other group followed them. When the retreating car stopped at an intersection about a block away from campus, the second caught up to them and the shooting began.

By the standard you apply in your post, that would not be a "school shooting". Having watched it unfold right in front of me, it sure felt like a school shooting.
 
Jack B wrote:
"IMO the liberal media is out of control."

Kind of interesting that NPR researches a story showing the records of the Department of Education (which is not part of the "liberal media") contain a large number of reported school shootings that didn't happen and you lambaste "the liberal media".
 
Also interesting is that a friend of mine "shared" the NPR link on her FB page. FB censored and removed it as violating community standards. Think about that NPR violating FB Community Standards? There's no bias at FB is there?
 
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