I'm sure you've all heard the statistic. I was naturally skeptical of anything in the Washington Post but in this case the claims are undisputed and easily verifiable.

The stunning number swept across the Internet within minutes of the news Wednesday that, yet again, another young man with another semiautomatic rifle had rampaged through a school, this time at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in South Florida.

The figure originated with Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group, co-founded by Michael Bloomberg, that works to prevent gun violence and is most famous for its running tally of school shootings.

“This,” the organization tweeted at 4:22 p.m. Wednesday, “is the 18th school shooting in the U.S. in 2018.”

...

It is a horrifying statistic. And it is wrong.
WaPo: No, there haven’t been 18 school shootings in 2018. That number is flat wrong.

Just as a teaser, here's one example of a "school shooting" as defined by Everytown:

Take, for example, what it counted as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.

They list quite a few other examples that are absolutely not what I call a "school shooting". Some other examples, however, were not so clear to me (nor did the article portray them as clear). It was interesting that there's some real ambiguity in what is and is not a school shooting... at least in my own head. But what is abundantly clear is that 18 is, in fact, a greatly exaggerated number.

If you want much more credible gun statistics, the article referenced a site I'd already come across, Gun Violence Archive. I suspect that site under-counts but not out of spin. They just verify everything and so I suspect that some incidents don't get reported and/or are unverifiable. But they seem to at least try to get the facts right. As the WaPo article notes, it's not like you need to exaggerate the numbers to make them horrifying.

Among all the wealthy nations, 91% of all children under the age of 15 who were killed by a bullet live in the United States.

That is sufficiently horrifying to me.

If you can't get to the WaPo article, an icognito window in your browser gets around it (Thanks Caitlin Johnstone).