You and I knew it wasn’t true

But HuffPo needed a headline

FBI figures tweaked to show phony increase in mass shootings, report says

Crime stats published by the FBI and relied upon by the media distort the gun violence and leave the public with the impression “mass shooting” incidents are a much bigger threat than they really are, according to a criminologist and Second Amendment scholar.

The bureau’s annual reports tabulating and classifying a wide range of crime throughout the nation have been historically free of politics, but John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said the latest statistics contain numbers that are misleading at best and deliberately fudged at worst. Lott believes the numbers may have been presented to overstate for political purposes the true risk of being a victim of random gun crimes.

“The FBI put out a clearly incorrect set of numbers on public shootings shortly before the November election last year,” said Lott, a frequent opinion writer for FoxNews.com and author of “More Guns, Less Crime.” “I have been reading FBI reports for 30 years and I have never seen anything like this.It is one thing for the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the National Institute of Justice to put out politically biased studies, but there has always been a Chinese wall separating the FBI raw data collection from political pressures.”

Asked for comment, Katherine Schweit, the FBI’s section chief of the bureau’s Active Shooter Initiative, said only Tuesday night that its report isolates active shooter incidents and evaluates available data based on methodology detailed on the FBI’s official website.

Behind a link that says “Beware the Leopard!!!” no doubt.

In essence, the government suddenly threw out their old numbers and methodology and instead took up the Brady Foundation mantle of looking at media reports.

Less 24 hour media, less reports available. Viola! More mass shootings since 1976 and a HuffPo headline.