Kentucky Arrest Touches on Issue With ‘School Shooting’ Statistics

After the horrors of the Apalachee High School shooting, a lot of people in the media started talking about school shootings. 

Most, they noted, weren’t quite like Apalachee High or Parkland or Uvalde. Most are more pedestrian sorts of shooting, where one guy shoots another guy. The kind that would largely go unremarked upon if it wasn’t on school grounds.

Yet when you dig a little deeper, you see that many of these shootings are only “school shootings” because they happened on school grounds and not that they had much of anything to do with school.

Take this arrest out of Kentucky, for example.

Two teens were shot around 8 p.m. Sunday at PRP High School as their team played Male, LMPD said.
The game was on Sunday because it had been postponed by rain on Friday.
One of the victims, a boy, was shot multiple times and is in critical condition, JCPS police said. Another victim showed up to a hospital but is expected to be OK.
A police report shows Damon Jerome Williams Jr., 22, was arrested during the game, around 7:45 p.m., after police said witnesses saw him throw two guns over the fence.

Now, two teens were shot, presumably students, and someone was arrested for having two guns on school property and being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm.

They haven’t connected him to the shooting, though that may be forthcoming.

Yet even if he didn’t shoot the kids, this is a 22-year-old man who was at a football game open to the public when the shooting occurred. This would go down as a “school shooting” despite the fact that it was anything but what most might think of as such.

Everywhere we turn, we have some entity claiming to track these incidents, but using overly broad definitions that are designed just to drive up the total numbers.

There’s no evidence that the school had any bearing on this shooting other than it was a convenient place to find the people the shooter wanted to hurt. A football game is open to the public. People go to watch sports. I’ve had friends who would go to watch games when their kids went to completely different schools, just because they liked high school football. Anyone can go.

So it’s not remotely the same as a kid smuggling a gun onto the campus and shooting someone.

The fact that at 22-year-old man was arrested for having guns when this incident happened is evidence that anyone could go to the game and that there wasn’t really much security to keep firearms out in the first place.

It’s not a school shooting.

But it’ll be counted as one and we all know it.

This is why you need to be skeptical of literally anything the media says on anything. They’re pushing a narrative and they’ll use whatever incredibly biased numbers best help them advance that narrative.

This incident, however, proves that it’s all about advancing a narrative and not reporting facts. Hell, it’s getting hard to determine what really are facts anymore, thanks to how the media portrays things.

One fact, though, is that every thing most people think they know about shootings, violent crime, and so on is wrong. This is an example of why they’re wrong.