UMD student Jay Wojciechowski on “Gun Control- Recent mass shootings raise concerns on campus”
I wrote this letter to the editor to dispute the use of a statistic from Wednesday’s story about the concerns of campus security in the wake of the recent campus shooting that took place in Oregon. In the second paragraph, the claim was made in an article by The Washington Post that there have been 294 mass shootings to date in the United States in 2015. What concerns me is the fact that the Washington Post and other news sources, including the Statesman, are using a biased source named “Mass Shooting Tracker,” which is operated by the pro-gun control Reddit community /r/gunsarecool. It would have been more appropriate if the UMD Statesman had instead used the FBI’s statistics and definition of the term “mass shooting,” since there is an obvious political motive behind the website cited by the Washington Post and The Statesman.
Jay Wojciechowski