CBS News just got a painful lesson in math — and honesty — after publishing a widely mocked claim that one in every 15 American adults has been present at a mass shooting. The figure, regurgitated from a University of Colorado study, triggered immediate backlash for being not only misleading, but utterly implausible.

The so-called “study” cited by CBS used an extremely loose definition of “mass shooting” — any incident in which four or more people are shot, not killed. That broad criteria scoops up everything from gang violence and drug deals gone wrong to domestic disputes and street corner crossfires. It’s the same trick used by the left-wing Gun Violence Archive to inflate numbers and terrify the public into supporting radical gun control.

CBS’s article, written by Sarah Horbacewicz, failed to include any critical analysis or mathematical scrutiny. Instead, it simply repeated the claim as fact and moved on to a dramatic emotional appeal surrounding the 2021 King Soopers grocery store shooting in Colorado.

That didn’t fly with critics who understand basic arithmetic.

“Four seconds of critical thinking and math tell me it is not at all possible that 17.3 million adults in the U.S. have witnessed a mass shooting,” said investigative reporter Parker Thayer.

Others shredded the “methodology” used to arrive at the stat. Critics pointed out the study leaned heavily on self-reported YouGov surveys — notorious for skewed sampling — while failing to verify what actually counts as “being present” at a shooting. Were these people in the building? A block away? In the same ZIP code?

“This is what happens when activist academics and lazy journalists team up to gaslight the public,” said one observer. “They’re juicing the numbers by lumping neighborhood shootouts and gang violence in with school shootings.”

Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review called out the deliberate manipulation of public fear: “The press, and the people feeding it, have been slowly escalating these completely ridiculous claims, and now they’ve arrived… here.”

Gun rights attorney Kostas Moros summed up the hypocrisy best: “Antigunners gleefully sharing this are the same people who shriek with rage when some survey data shows three million Americans have used a gun for self-defense.”

This isn’t just bad journalism — it’s narrative warfare. The left doesn’t need facts; it needs feelings. And by flooding the media with absurd claims, they hope to overwhelm common sense and force Americans to believe they’re living in a war zone that only government disarmament can solve.

But the facts tell a different story.

The Cato Institute’s actual data found 298 mass murderers were responsible for 1,733 deaths from 1966 to 2024 — that’s over nearly 60 years. Your annual chance of being killed in a mass shooting? About 1 in 9.1 million.

Yet somehow, CBS wants us to believe that 1 in 15 Americans has been in the room when a mass shooting broke out?

No wonder the mainstream media is in freefall. Americans aren’t buying the hysteria anymore — they’re demanding truth, not narrative-driven garbage wrapped in academic credentials.

This episode proves what many already knew: the “gun violence epidemic” isn’t being driven by data. It’s being manufactured by agenda-driven institutions desperate to erode the Second Amendment through fear, fiction, and fake stats.