By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
The horrific shooting that occurred at Brown University Saturday afternoon that left two students dead and wounded nine more evidently wasn’t enough for the staff at CNN, which sought to use the deadly attack to promote their anti-gun beliefs.
The third paragraph of CNN’s non-bylined story titled “Manhunt for Brown University shooter enters third day as person of interest released,” which was published at 9:47 a.m. EST Monday morning, contained this fictional tidbit:
“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,” CNN wrote.
The link takes readers to a second story that CNN published Saturday, which contains charts and graphs all supplied by the Gun Violence Archive. However, CNN still felt the need to add the following disclaimer:
“CNN reports mass shootings based on data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tracks gun violence in the United States. CNN and the GVA define a mass shooting as one that injured or killed four or more people, not including the shooter. The number of mass shootings and casualties is not exact and subject to change as reports from law enforcement, media and other sources GVA relies upon are updated and verified.”
To be clear, any data supplied by the Gun Violence Archive, or GVA, is “not exact and subject to change.”
We have published more than a dozen stories about the GVA and its fictional “mass shooting data,” and CNN knows very well all of GVA’s data problems. They’ve been writing about them for years.
In a 2022 CNN story titled “How a tiny nonprofit with no full-time employees became the foremost tracker of gun violence in America,” CNN Senior Writer Eric Levenson wrote how the “Second Amendment Foundation, a nonprofit gun rights group, has criticized the Gun Violence Archive’s expansive definition of the term as sensational and misleading.”
“When most Americans hear the term ‘mass shooting,’ they picture a crazed gunman stalking the halls of a school or a shopping mall, coldly and randomly executing innocent young victims,” CNN wrote, citing SAF’s story. “What does not come to mind are rival drug crews shooting it out in Chicago or Detroit, or a madman murdering his entire family.”
In the same 2022 story, CNN asked Mark Bryant, one of GVA’s cofounders, about his opinion of SAF’s criticism.
“My answer on that is, the same number of people are shot whether you call it a ‘mass shooting’ or whether you call it a ‘shooting that four people or more were shot,’” Bryant told CNN. “But they just don’t like when the (term) ‘mass shooting’ is used, some don’t like that.”
Bryant was trying to walk away from the main criticism of his small website, which has nothing to do with what he calls the mass shootings. It’s his data that is always suspect.
For example, according to Bryant’s all-inclusive definition, there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much narrower and more realistic definition.
This is why CNN is still nervous about relying on GVA data, and why they insist on so many explanations and caveats whenever they cite the group’s numbers.
As we first reported 2021, CNN and other media outlets who use GVA’s inflated numbers are hooked, because once they a publish Bryant’s definition and its much higher numbers, there is no going back to the truth.
After all, how would they explain to their viewers that their mass-shooting numbers have declined by 95 percent?
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