ABC uses misleading tweet to push anti-gun narrative

ABC News posted a tweet Tuesday morning that misleads followers into thinking that 7,000 kids have been killed in school shooting since the Columbine tragedy.

“Activists place thousands of shoes near the U.S. Capitol, creating a memorial to children killed by gun violence since the Sandy Hook school shooting,” they tweeted in a post that includes a video of a professionally organized event by Avaaz – a group that specializes in outrage clicktivism and leftist optics.

In the video, the group holds up a banner that says “7,000 kids killed” which, when mixed with ABC’s biased Twitter post, may lead viewers to think that mass school shootings have taken the lives of that many children just since Columbine. What’s even worse is that the link in the tweet doesn’t go to an article about the shoe protest or proof that so many kids have been killed in mass school shootings, but instead to an ABC “news” article that takes a leftward swipe at the president and the NRA.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Monday pushed back against suggestions that the White House’s newly-released school safety proposals amount to a retreat for President Donald Trump in the face of pressure from the National Rifle Association.

But, how close to the actual figure is ABC’s less-than-honest tweet? Have 7,000 children been killed in mass school shootings since Sandy Hook?

In fact, only 122 people have been killed in mass school shootings if we go all the way back to Columbine. The Sandy Hook tragedy happened three years later.

Since the Columbine High School massacre set off a nationwide moral panic in 1999, there have been 10 school shootings in which four or more people were killed. Including the death or suicide of the perpetrators, these mass shootings have resulted in 122 fatalities.

The “thousands” of children that have been killed due to gun violence were murdered due to their gang affiliation, during the commission of a crime, in domestic violence incidents and other far more deadly situations than mass shootings in America’s more than 100,000 public schools.

ABC’s positioning of the protest and correlation to Columbine is ideological at best and an unethical approach to news at worst.