With a shot at Democrats criticizing the National Rifle Association, a photo incorrectly states that President Joe Biden enacted the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 and then linked the legislation to mass shootings. The claim lacks context. Biden, a Democrat, did not submit the original bill or a later amended version when he served in the U.S. Senate in the 1990s. But the 1990 gun-free school zones law was passed as part of a series of legislation sponsored by Biden, known as the Crime Bill. The related mass shooting claim falls outside the scope of this fact check.
“This is Joe Biden. In 1990, he introduced the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, ”reads the photo. ‘Since then, 92% of large-scale mass shootings have taken place in gun-free zones. But Democrats blame the NRA. ”
Examples of the post can be found here, here, and t.co/KG2vrJ4Wh7.
Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl, a Democrat, enacted the gun-free zone legislation on February 5, 1990 with one fellow sponsor, Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, a fellow Democrat, showing the congressional records here. It is packed with other smaller bills sponsored by a variety of legislators in the comprehensive Biden Crime Control Act of 1990 sponsored by Biden and passed by the Senate on October 27, 1990, as shown here. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee at the time, Senator Biden only sponsored the crime bill.
Five years later, on June 7, 1995, Kohl introduced the gun-free schools law in the 1995 Senate. Biden’s name does not appear in a list of his ten co-sponsors from both parties in the congressional records here. This version prohibits the possession of guns that were part of an interstate trade near a school, which explicitly gave the federal government jurisdiction over firearms that would violate the U.S. Constitution Trade Clause. Congress adopted this new version as a solution to the Supreme Court’s ruling that the 1990 Act was unconstitutional, as set out here.
According to the law, a gun-free zone extends 1000 meters from the site of a public, parochial and private school. (here). It captures areas within 0.31 km (or about one city block) of a campus. Gun rights activists said this distance could lead to the prosecution of responsible gun owners living near schools. They say allowing guns in or near schools could also enable people to respond to mass shooters.
The second part of the claim is difficult to verify because it does not define ‘large-scale shooting’.
As PolitiFact here and the Washington Post here say, there are no universal standard definitions of ‘mass shootings’. The federal government defined ‘mass murder’ as one with three or more deaths and ‘mass murder’ as four or more.
Everytown, a leading gun safety group, defines mass shootings here as “an incident in which four or more people are shot dead, in addition to the shooter.” It has been found that more than half of the mass shooting incidents took place in a person’s home during the decade that began here in 2009.
Just as there is no agreed definition of ‘mass shooting’, there is no consensus on what thresholds shooting is as large, medium or small. The photo does not explain the criteria for a ‘large’ mass shooting. It is then impossible to say with accuracy what percentage of “large mass shootings” have taken place within gun-free school zones over the past 31 years.
Yet it is possible to look at the ten largest mass shootings since the early 1990s, either by total casualties or deaths, and their local environment. The shooting in gun-free school zones in this case does not represent nearly the largest mass shooting in American history.
The Mother Jones Mass Shootings Database here shows that out of the ten U.S. mass shootings with the most casualties (both killed and injured) since the early 1990s, only one was on a site that fits the definition of a federal gun-free school zone – High School Columbine. In April 1990, six months before the 1990 crime law went into effect, 13 people were killed and 24 injured at Colorado High School. Virginia Tech, where 32 died and 23 were injured in 2007, had its own gun-free policy not related to federal law (here). There do not appear to be schools within 1000 feet of the other firing points when using the latitude and longitude coordinates of the Mother Jones database.
Rankings by deaths add the Sandy Hook Elementary (27 dead) and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting (17 dead), both clearly in school zones, to the top-10, but drop Columbine. The 2009 shooting that took 14 lives in an American civil society in New York appears to be within the federally defined Guns-Free School Zone for Binghamton High School. There do not appear to be any schools within 1000 feet of the other fatal shooting ranges.
VERDICT
Context missing. Biden did not enact the Guns-Free Schools Zone Act of 1990, but the legislation was incorporated into the crime bill he sponsored. It is not possible to verify claims about ‘major shootings’.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our work to actually check social media posts.