BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today congratulated CNN for helping to expose what now appears to be a deliberate deception by Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown for Gun Safety” that claims there have been 74 school shootings since the December 2012 Sandy Hook tragedy.
That figure is also being questioned by other news outlets after one curious journalist looked at the list of shootings released by the Everytown group, along with a map, and discovered that many didn’t happen on school campuses, and others were gang-related events after school hours, or that happened in parking lots.
“Bloomberg should change the name of his $50 million ‘grassroots’ political machine to ‘Every Liar for Gun Safety’,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “This press scrutiny of claims by the gun prohibition lobby is long overdue, because this is hardly the first time that anti-gunners have tried to bamboozle the public with deceptive data.”
CNN used the 74 shootings claim from the “Everytown” group before it “took a closer look at the list, delving into the circumstances of each incident Everytown included. Gottlieb was delighted that the news agency dug into the figures, but wishes CNN had done that sooner, rather than later.
“CNN used the figure without checking, even though in its follow-up report, the network acknowledged knowing that it came from Bloomberg’s ‘Everytown” group, and that the billionaire former mayor is ‘a passionate and public advocate of gun control’,” Gottlieb stated. “I’ll bet CNN would never use data from gun rights organizations without first checking it for accuracy.
“Sadly,” he concluded, “this episode not only reveals how gun prohibitionists try to fool people with questionable information, it also shows that the liberal, anti-gun-rights media all-too-willingly accepts such information at face value. What does that say about press partisanship, if not press gullibility? Let’s hope that from now on, CNN and other news agencies challenge information from anti-gun organizations before treating it like scripture.”