CNN’s Jim Acosta tweeted some incredibly misleading statistics about mass shootings on Thursday morning.
In order to commemorate the anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting, Acosta linked to a Vox article that claims there have been 1,552 mass shootings since then.
Since Sandy Hook there have been at least 1,552 mass shootings, with at least 1,767 people killed and 6,227 wounded. https://t.co/RZeFDHhYmR
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) December 14, 2017
The Vox article is probably more useful for narrative-building than accuracy, because it gathers its data from the “Gun Violence Archive,” which uses one of the broadest definitions for mass shootings. The Gun Violence Archive counts any shooting with four or more people shot and injured or killed as a “mass shooting.”
California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Sen. Richard Pan used the GVA data last year, and Politifact rated their statements about mass shootings “mostly false.”
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