CNN reacted to Wednesday’s attack at Georgia’s Fort Stewart by claiming there have been “260 mass shootings” thus far in 2025.
CNN admitted to relying on the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) definition to arrive at the figure of 260, noting, “Both CNN and GVA define a ‘mass shooting’ as a shooting that injured or killed four or more people, not including the shooter.”
The definition used by CNN and GVA is important because it allows them to reference incidents as mass shootings even though the incident may not traditionally be considered that type of shooting.
In other words, by counting incidents with no fatalities or fewer than four fatalities as a mass shooting, the GVA approach allows drive-by shootings, double homicides, murder-suicides, triple homicides, gang violence, 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” in decades gone by and continues to be the standard, except with outlets like CNN and organizations like GVA, who have attempted to redefine the terms.
On Thanksgiving Day 2022, The Hill published a story built on GVA numbers and claimed there had been over 600 mass shootings by that point in the year.
Breitbart News reported a similar inflation of reported mass shootings in 2015, noting that Mother Jones editor Mark Follman addressed the left’s exaggerated claims of “355 mass shootings” for the year and pointed out the actual number was about four.
Follman pointed out that when the real definition of a mass shooting was applied–at least four people shot and killed–the record showed there had only been four mass shootings in the United States between January 1, 2015, and December 3, 2015.
Think about it: The left claimed 355 mass shootings for the year and Follman showed they were off by 351 incidents.
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.
