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The rise was noticed by Snopes, a fact-checking website that has been accused of having a strong left-wing bias. In fact, Obama’s presidency marked a sharp rise in mass shootings which seemed to pass unnoticed by the mainstream media. Trump critics might claim that there were far fewer shootings during Obama’s administration, blaming the rise in attacks on Trump. This far exceeds any criticism President Obama received in the wake of mass shootings. An analysis by the NY Times ran under the headline “El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoed Trump’s Language.” It is difficult to consider these statistics just a few days after two shootings but most media are already politicizing the attacks, blaming President Trump despite his remarks condemning the attacks, calling them “an unspeakable act of evil.” All eight of the Democratic presidential candidates blamed Trump to some degree with four linking the president to white nationalism. This was debunked by USA Today which discovered that the statistic was a reference to incidents involving the firing of weapons on school grounds, three of which were accidental and only seven of which resulted in injuries. One such example was a widely shared meme circulating in mid-February 2018 which stated that there had been eighteen “school shootings” so far in 2018. More importantly, the public reaction to the events is heavily influenced by the media. Media: Biased and Sometimes Even Worse Than Thatīut all of these statistics are affected by interpretation of what defines a mass shooting. The majority of perpetrators are white males who act alone but the proportion of mass shooters in the United States who are white and male is not considerably greater than the proportion of white males in the general population of the U.S. Conversely, despite the number of public mass shootings increasing substantially in recent years, there has been an approximately 50 percent decrease in firearm homicides in the nation overall since 1993. Studies indicate that the rate at which public mass shootings occur has tripled since 2011.