Misleading Canadian statistic cited in posts on gun debate

"Canadian here, your neighbour with cold winters and sensible gun laws. Did you know we've had 11 school shooting deaths?" says text repeatedly shared on Facebook. "Not this month or this year, but total, in history. And absolutely no deaths in elementary schools. Why? Because gun laws save lives."

The text is from a tweet initially published on June 4, 2022, a week after the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Since it was originally posted, the tweet has circulated as a screenshot on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter thousands of times, often after a mass shooting in the US.

In a reply to the original tweet, the account clarified it was only counting shootings at K-12 schools, but the reshares of the message exclude this context.

The screenshot is shared indiscriminately in response to shootings including when actor Mark Hamill shared the image five days after the shooting at Michigan State University in February 2023.

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A screenshot of one of the reposts of the misleading statistic, taken April 17, 2023.

Noah Schwartz, an assistant professor of political science at the University of the Fraser Valley, said he found the statistic misleading, citing the Ecole Polytechnique shooting at a university in Montreal, where 15 people died in 1989.

"That's what prompted a lot of our gun control legislation that we had in the 1990s," Schwartz said.

History of Canada school shootings

Schwartz researches firearms policy in North America and said neither the US nor Canada has a central agency to collect data on the number of mass shootings in schools.

News outlets in Canada, such as the Toronto Star and CBC, have put together lists attempting to tally the total lives lost at deadly shootings at schools.

According to this reporting, there have been incidents at four colleges and universities, eight K-12 schools and one daycare, since 1975. Shootings at K-12 schools led to the deaths of 11 students and three school staff members.

One spree involving a school shooting in La Loche, Saskatchewan was also preceded by the shooting and deaths of two brothers off-campus. In the 2013 shooting at the daycare, two staff members were killed.

Separate shootings at the University of Alberta, Concordia University and Dawson College, led to the deaths of a combined seven university staff members and two adult students, in addition to the 15 people who died in the Polytechnique attack.

The misogynistic motivations of the shooting at Ecole Polytechnique in 1989 resulted in the deaths of 13 female university students and one female staff member, followed by the suicide of the gunman.

It prompted a national debate on firearms policy and the passage of Bill C-17 in 1991, imposing waiting periods and safety courses for gun license registration, as well as safe storage laws. This was followed by the adoption of the Firearms Act in 1995, which created a gun registry and centralized licensing rules.

How are school shootings counted

Independent projects in the US which track school shooting deaths vary on whether they include incidents at colleges and universities in the same category as K-12.

"Different agencies will have different definitions of mass shootings, which then leads to difficulties of how do we count mass shootings," Schwartz said. "So, any type of statistical comparison is going to be problematic."

According to Schwartz, criminologists will track crime incidents per 100,000 people to gauge the prevalence of a particular crime, such as mass shootings.

The US population is nearly 10 times larger than Canada's 38 million, "so already, if we had the exact same gun laws, the exact same rates of gun ownership, we would expect there to be more people being killed in school shootings in the United States than in Canada," he said.

A database from the gun-control research organization Everytown listed the US rate of gun-related death as 4.38 per 100,000, while in Canada it was 0.62 deaths per 100,000. This does not specify death rates from school shootings.

Statistics Canada, the Canadian federal data-collection agency, tracks crime rates per 100,000 people as well, but also doesn't have a category for school shootings.

Schwartz said that while the likelihood of these events occurring is lower in Canada, the country still has problems with gun violence that would best be addressed by looking at accurate statistics and whole-picture analysis of what societal issues cause gun-related death.

"In these debates, no matter how valid our causes, if we don't tell the truth, then we are still doing wrong," he said.

More of AFP's reporting on misinformation in Canada is available here.