Tag: statistics

The Statistics War Over School Shootings Since Columbine, Especially By Transgender Shooters

Since the horrific Columbine shooting in April 1999, there’ve been a tragic number of American public and religious school shootings. No matter how “experts” gloss over their statistics, if a single death is a tragedy, mass killings are light years beyond “tragedy.”

Having lost a son in high school – not from shooting, but from another life-altering catastrophe – I can only imagine the tidal wave of grief engulfing the family and friends of those lost children.

Much less reported, though nonetheless a tragedy, is that a disproportionate number of these shootings were perpetrated by those who identify as “transgender.” 

Triggered by this latest shooting, I went looking for the real stats, trying to discover how much tragedy is really out there. I sought what most media shy away from. 

As a trained journalist, I dug deep, recalling that:

If you want to know how many school shootings have occurred, just check the stats. 

I’d learned this in J-School: Numbers never lie. Of course, my pre-Watergate profs assumed credible sources had credible numbers.    

Right? Well, maybe. But don’t count on it.

While citing traditionally credible sources, the one that seems most honest in pointing out that nobody knows which stats to refer to as they judge the horrific impact of school shootings, Al Jazeera – a source I never thought I’d cite – said it clearly on August 28, 2025. 

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics at BLS

President Trump has appointed E.J. Antoni, an economist from the Heritage Foundation, to head up the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This is an extremely challenging job because the traditional approach — not going back months, but decades — has always been terribly partisan. It is, almost by definition, based more on a ton of subjective opinions than on any actual objective facts.

The press — even the allegedly business-minded publications, which ought to know better — is slamming President Trump for firing the last BLS chief, claiming that she was fired only “because last month’s numbers weren’t to his liking.”

It’s a lie.

In fact, the BLS has been producing objectively bad reports for decades, routinely exaggerating the good news during Democrat administrations and exaggerating the bad news during Republican administrations. They’re always quietly adjusting the numbers weeks or months after the fact — and it’s funny, isn’t it, how the adjustments always seem to favor the Democrats and hurt the GOP?

E.J. Antoni is a great numbers guy. To the extent that this job can be done well, in a nation this huge and an economy this diverse, he’ll be fine.

But, just as we have learned to expect more creativity from this administration in areas of foreign policy and bureaucratic oversight, let’s hope too for more creativity in this statistics-gathering role.

The really important challenge is going to be in establishing rational expectations in defining the real meaning of these statistics.

When the BLS reports on job growth and unemployment changes, to be really helpful they need to provide more precise definitions so that we can better interpret the information.

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MISSING MURDERS: Latest FBI homicide numbers OMIT New York and LA

On Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released their national crime statistics report for 2021. However, that report leaves out key data from Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and other high-crime locales.

That report revealed that the murder rate had increased compared to the previous year.

According to a press release, the estimated number of murders nationwide increased from 22,000 in 2020 to 22,900 in 2021, a 4.3 percent jump.

The FBI explained that while murder and rape went up in 2021, robbery was down 8.9 percent, balancing things out, which they say resulted in a relatively consistent violent and property crime rate compared to 2020.

“It is important to note that these estimated trends are not considered statistically significant by NIBRS estimation methods,” they wrote, adding that “the nonsignificant nature of the observed trends is why, despite these described changes, the overall message is that crime remained consistent.”

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, however, the FBI’s latest report should be viewed with caution for a number of reasons.

Firstly, they explained, law enforcement agencies across the country have had to transition to the new National Incident Based Reporting System, which not all have done.

This has left sizable gaps in the reporting, including a lack of information from places known for having a higher than average crime rate.

Among the areas that have not switched over to the new system, and thus were not included in the 2021 report, are New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, which has stated that they don’t plan on making the shift until 2025.

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Fordham professor makes up statistic about AR-15s to peddle gun control

A Fordham University history professor recently was caught fabricating a statistic about the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

In a May 19 Slate article, gun control advocate Saul Cornell claimed the AR-15 is “200 times more deadly” than the rifles used in the American Revolution.

“Recent events in New York have brought the grim realities of America’s gun violence problem into sharp relief,” Cornell wrote. “In both instances, the perpetrators took advantage of the nation’s lax gun laws and legally purchased firearms whose lethality would have been unimaginable to the authors of the Second Amendment.”

Cornell also chided conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices for clinging to “originalist fantasy” and being “happy to parrot the propaganda” put forth by the National Rifle Association.

But National Review’s Kevin Williamson asked Cornell about the “200 times” statistic and discovered the professor had used World War II-era machine guns as a “stand-in” for AR-15s.

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AOC Slams Republicans For Using ‘Statistics’ And ‘Studies’ To Debunk Her Green New Deal Claims

Celebrating “Earth Day,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed Republicans for using “statistics and studies” in their opposition to her Green New Deal proposals, which included the widespread abandonment of fossil fuels in favor of “green” energy.

“Happy Earth Day!” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Here’s a friendly reminder from this morning’s committee hearing that investing in sustainable energy sources now makes more financial sense than spending billions to repair fossil fuel infrastructure after each climate disaster.”

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Nine out of ten leading causes of death were below average in June – or were they just wrongly attributed to covid?

On the 17th July the Office for National Statistics published this astonishing chart :[1]

The Daily Mail were quick to point out that in June, covid was the third most significant cause of death [2] but no one seems to have drawn much attention to the most startling aspect of the new data:

In June all the normal leading causes of death were killing significantly fewer people than the five year average.

Are all the causes of death magically declining while covid grows?

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