SCHOOL SHOOTINGS
There's been a lot of recent debate over exactly how many school shootings we have in this country.
Fourteen of the shootings on our list happened in schools.
If you expand the list to the more traditional definition of "mass shooting," with four or more people killed, the number increases just slightly to 16 since 1984.
That's about one every other year.
It's a significantly smaller number than the one used by Everytown for Gun Safety. The gun control advocacy group claims there were 18 school shootings since the start of 2018 and 290 since 2013.
The problem with Everytown's number is it includes incidents like this one from Minnesota where a third grader pulled the trigger on a school liaison officer's gun while it was holstered. Nobody was injured, and it doesn't appear that the kid intended to harm anyone.
Or this one from Kansas where a man shot himself in the foot by accident. He went to adjust his sock when the gun holstered to his ankle accidentally discharged during a graduation ceremony.
The problem with using only mass casualty shootings is what happened at a Kentucky high school in January doesn't make the list. In that incident, a 15-year-old student killed two teens and wounded more than a dozen others.