Reporter: The School Shootings That Weren’t

Last spring, the US Education Department reported that during the 2015-16 term, nearly 240 US schools reported at least one incident involving a school-related shooting.” But Anya Kamenetz at NPR investigated, reaching out to every single school, and found that “more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened.” In fact, NPR was able to confirm just 11 reported incidents. But while DOE says it will update some of the data, it has “no plans to republish the existing publication.” Yet all this confusion “comes at a time when the need for clear data on school violence has never been more pressing”: Districts around the country “are spending millions of dollars to ‘harden’ schools with new security measures and equipment.”

Political scribe: Time To Kill the Presidential Caucuses

Last weekend, the Democratic Party passed a number of reforms to its presidential nominating process, including one that Paul Waldman at The Washington Post calls a long-overdue move “away from one of the most awful and anti-democratic features” of the political process. The new party rules affirmed the decision of six states to switch from caucuses, which favor insurgent candidates, to primaries. For all the quadrennial reporting hailing Iowa as “an inspiring example of democracy in action,” the presidential caucus “needs to be destroyed.” It’s anti-democratic because it can take hours — which is why turnout is always so much lower in caucuses than in primaries. That means “vital choices are being made by a tiny portion of the population.”

Defense analyst: Korean Peace More Critical Than Nukes

One thing about North Korea remains “crystal clear,” according to Daniel Davis at The Hill: “So long as the administration believes [it] can get Kim Jong-un to denuclearize without giving anything in return, the talks will go nowhere.” Certainly, Pyongyang believes President Trump wants it to give up its weapons and missiles before getting anything in return. But “in order to get something major, we’re going to have to give something major.” Davis urges a shift to “peace and diplomacy, not a hard-line call for denuclearization.” Simply put, “preserving American security and protecting US economic interests in the Asia-Pacific region are our vital, strategic interests.” Moreover, “those aims are realistic, within our power to accomplish and can be attained.”

Foreign desk: Russia Needed an Opponent Like McCain

John McCain is being mourned in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Georgia — but not Russia, where he’s been branded “an enemy of the state,” notes Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky. That’s understandable: McCain “always backed countries and politicians trying to break away from Russia’s orbit and bashed Vladimir Putin and his allies.” And “there was no nuance” to his “firm conviction” that Russia “deserved to keep losing as a revanchist authoritarian state.” Unfortunately, McCain “never appeared to feel a need to learn more about how Russia worked.” And his “approximate understanding of the intricacies of post-Soviet politics and power dynamics has probably weakened Putin’s opponents in Russia.” Still, “even if he was often wrong about details, he was right about important fundamentals,” like the need to challenge imperialism and authoritarianism.

Conservative: Only the Right Ousts Its Extremists

The Claremont Institute’s decision to take down an email listserv after learning some white nationalists were on it “prompted spasms of glee from the left-leaning press,” notes Ben Shapiro at National Review. Fact is, “time and again, mainstream institutions on the right are slandered as homes for racism, sexism and miscellaneous other bigotry, even when those institutions work to root out such bigotry.” Yet the Left “almost never throws out thinkers for ideological reasons.” Indeed, “it mainstreams them.” (Think Linda Sarsour.) Sad to say, “the Left’s refusal to acknowledge” conservatives’ self-policing “has led too many on the right” to “begin making common cause with those they should have thrown out of the tent long ago.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann