The shooting at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others was tragic on its own. CNN decided that wasn’t enough.
Instead of reporting the facts and letting the investigation unfold, CNN used the attack as a vehicle to push its familiar gun-control narrative by citing long-debunked data from the Gun Violence Archive.
In a non-bylined story published Monday morning titled “Manhunt for Brown University shooter enters third day as person of interest released,” CNN injected the following claim into the third paragraph:
“The carnage followed at least 75 school shootings in the United States this year. So far in 2025, there have been at least 391 mass shootings and 13,929 shooting deaths nationwide, Gun Violence Archive reports.”
That link sends readers to a second CNN article built entirely on Gun Violence Archive charts and figures. CNN then felt compelled to protect itself with a disclaimer admitting the numbers are unreliable.
CNN acknowledged that it relies on GVA data, that it uses GVA’s definition of a mass shooting, and that the numbers are “not exact and subject to change.”
That final sentence is doing a lot of work.
Gun Violence Archive data has been a recurring problem for legacy media outlets, and CNN knows it. The Truth About Guns has published more than a dozen articles documenting GVA’s inflated and misleading methodology. CNN has written about it too.
In a 2022 piece titled “How a tiny nonprofit with no full-time employees became the foremost tracker of gun violence in America,” CNN senior writer Eric Levenson quoted the Second Amendment Foundation’s criticism of GVA’s definition of mass shooting as sensational and misleading.
CNN even summarized the problem accurately.
When most Americans hear the term “mass shooting,” they think of school attacks, shopping malls, or public venues where victims are targeted at random. They do not think of gang shootings, domestic murders, or criminal disputes that GVA routinely lumps into the same category.
CNN acknowledged that distinction. Then it ignored it.
The same article quoted GVA co-founder Mark Bryant attempting to sidestep the criticism by claiming that terminology doesn’t matter because the same number of people were shot regardless of what label is applied.
That misses the point entirely.
The issue has never been semantics. It is data integrity.
Under GVA’s definition, 417 “mass shootings” occurred in 2019. The FBI, using a narrower and more realistic definition tied to active shooter events, reported 30.
That discrepancy is not a rounding error. It is the difference between reporting reality and manufacturing panic.
CNN knows this. That is why it pads every GVA citation with explanations and caveats. Yet it continues to use the numbers anyway, especially when a high-profile tragedy provides an opportunity to do so.
Once a media outlet commits to GVA’s inflated figures, it becomes trapped. Walking them back would require admitting that prior coverage overstated the problem by orders of magnitude.
As we reported in 2021, once the media adopts GVA’s definition, there is no path back to honest reporting. If they returned to FBI standards, they would have to explain why mass shootings suddenly dropped by more than 90 percent.
That conversation is one CNN is unwilling to have.
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