Graham Jaehnig/Daily Mining Gazette David Grossman, a retired military psychologist, discussed the media’s deceptive reporting on school massacre statistics to deflect the real root cause of school shootings.

HOUGHTON — During his Monday presentation at the Houghton High School, retired Army Lt. Col. David Grossman said while the popular argument in the U.S. regarding school massacres is the lack of adequate firearm regulation, guns are not the problem.

China has had school massacres involving knives, axes, even swords, he said, and also in Russia, knives and arson have been used to commit school massacres. Instances of non-firearm school massacres in other countries abound, he said, while in the U.S., the mantra is “Get rid of guns,” Grossman said.

He accuses the U.S. media of being intentionally misleading.

The media, he said, is deflecting the reality away from itself in promoting intense violence in movies, television shows and video games responsible for school massacres. He said these multibillion-dollar entertainment genres are what psychologists are saying is at the root of the real problem.

Grossman said there is evidence the media is manipulating statistics and slanting the truth.

In 2014, Pacific Standard online magazine claimed: “There may be a lot of issues at play, but it’s undeniable that the ease of access to guns in the United States is a major contributing factor to our ongoing school shooting crisis.”

Grossman claimed this was misleading, because the number of school massacres is increasing worldwide, but they are not mentioned in U.S. media.

Massacres are also common in the United Kingdom, according to the Guardian UK. That news organization has also conducted surveys and studies on teen killings.

“Police recorded a total of 215 fatal stabbings in the 12 months to March 2017,” the Guardian stated in a Feb. 2018 article. “This was a similar number to the 212 recorded for the previous 12 months, but a 16 (percent) increase over the 186 in the year to March 2015.”

NEXT: While the number of teen shootings have decreased dramatically in countries like the UK since handguns were banned, killings still occur.