How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school?
We should know. But we don’t.
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.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.
In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries.
“When we’re talking about such an important and rare event, [this] amount of data error could be very meaningful,” […]
Information is power.
–Witholding the info (eg not allowing science based opinion at EPA, stopping NASA climate research)
–Providing incomplete data (eg class inequality was obscured for decades by providing only data by quintile that obscured the real concentration)
–In my experience the greatest danger comes when a policymaker starts to brlieve their own misinformation. Whether it’s Clinton rigging unemployment calculations, FEMA? under-reporting Puerto Rico storm deaths or one of the corporate oligarchs creating a story about the safety of their products. Bad decisions can snowball.
Never trust the lying US Government and their lapdog corporate media to tell the truth about anything. We are living in George Orwell’s 1984, and we have been for many decades.