While Americans wait to know the final number of victims from Sunday’s heinous gun and arson attack on a Michigan church, CNN is claiming “there have been 324 mass shootings” thus far in 2025.
They make this claim just hours after Grand Blanc Township Police Chief William Renye warned that many more victims may be found in the burnt rubble of the church.
In fact, in his last communication with the American public Sunday night, Renye indicated two more bodies had been discovered in the burned church, bringing the total number of deaths to four. Only two of the four deceased individuals had been shot.
But CNN wants to focus how many mass shootings have occurred this year and they want to use misleading data from the Gun Violence Archive to do it.
According to CNN: “So far this year, there have been 324 mass shootings in the US, defined by the Gun Violence Archive as when at least four people are shot.”
On November 24, 2022, Breitbart News noted that The Hill used Gun Violence Archive data to claim there had been over 600 mass shootings that year.
Breitbart noted that the Gun Violence Archive tallies such a high number of mass shootings by counting incidents in which there is “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident,” as mass shootings. This approach allows drive-by shootings, double homicides, murder-suicides, triple homicides, gang violence, shootouts, and even firearm-related instances in which there are zero fatalities, to be counted as mass shootings.
On April 15, 2021, the Rand Corporation observed that the standard for mass shootings was derived from the FBI’s 1980s definition of a “mass murderer” as an individual who “kills four or more people in a single incident (not including himself).” Therefore, four or more deaths in a single incident by a single gunman was the working definition of a mass shooting.
The FBI’s “mass murderer” definition does not allow as many mass shootings to be reported as does the Gun Violence Archive’s data.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio, a member of Gun Owners of America, and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and has a Ph.D. in Military History. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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