For the last few weeks we have been hearing how many mass shootings have taken place in 2015. It is an alarming statistic. It is also a total exaggeration. Put another way, you could call it a lie.

News organization after news organization has reported that the mass shooting in San Bernardino was the 355th mass shooting this year. Newspapers like The Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York Times along with news programs like PBS, CBS, and MSNBC all reported the figure.

Fortunately, a number of liberals and conservatives have debunked the statistic. Mark Folman editor of Mother Jones says his count is about one-fifth the number often cited. Why such a discrepancy?

“The answer is that there is no official definition for ‘mass shooting.’ Almost all of the gun crimes behind the much larger statistic are less lethal and bear little relevance to the type of public mass murder we have just witnessed again. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others.”

He is being charitable. The 355 number comes from a group pushing gun control, and created a website that supposedly tracks mass shooting. It includes nearly every shooting so it can to make the number much larger than reality.

There is a larger lesson here: use your brain. Apparently many in the media did not. Think about this for a moment. Today we are in the 349th day of the year, and supposedly there have been 355 mass shootings. That is more than one a day. Does that make any sense? A discerning person should have stopped and questioned the figure.

A few months ago presidential candidate Ben Carson caused a furor when he suggested that people should fight back when a shooter enters a building. Now even some in law enforcement are essentially saying that may be a wise strategy.

Recently the Police Chief of the District of Columbia was on 60 Minutes. She explained: “The fact of the matter is that most active shooters kill most of the victims in 10 minutes or less, and the best police department in the country’s going to be about a 5-to-7 minute response.” That fits with something I often say on my radio program: “When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.”

She calmly explained to Anderson Cooper that you only have a few choices when confronted by a gunman. Either you run, hide, or fight. Apparently, Americans are seriously considering the third option. This year on Black Friday, 185,000 people got background checks for firearms. That was a one-day record in this country.

The Chief of Police for Detroit also talked about citizens fighting back. He argued that: “Detroiters are fed up; they’re fed up with violence.” He added that he would “stand by” the right of citizens in Detroit to defend themselves.

Ben Shapiro wrote a column with the title “7 Reasons You Should Buy a Gun After San Bernardino.” He argues that you should buy a gun and learn how to use it not because this administration might implement more gun control legislation. You should do this because the government cannot keep you safe.

Many of his reasons had to do with the inability or incompetence of the government to keep us safe from ISIS, to track down terrorists, and to screen refugees coming into this county. Some of his other reasons have to do with the fixation this administration and the mainstream media have on guns, gun registration, and gun control.

Not so long ago, we were told to call 911 and not resist. The new message seems to be: don’t be a victim and fight back.

The student protests over the last few months have not only been about how a college administration responds to student demands, but it has been about changing the college curriculum. One example of that can be found at Columbia University. In a recent commentary, Dennis Prager reacts to some of these complaints.

A young black undergraduate complained in an article in the Columbia Daily Spectator about having to sit in a history class. She complained that: “It’s traumatizing to sit in Core classes. We are looking at history through the lens of these powerful, white men. I have no power or agency as a black woman, so where do I fit in?”

Dennis Prager begins by talking about the words she uses. This illustrates how successfully the university has indoctrinated students with leftist ideas and rhetoric. Who even uses the word “agency” the way she did? And she talks about it being “traumatizing” to learn about the finest ideas and art developed in Western culture.

She laments that the course is “looking at history through the lens of powerful, white men.” That shows that race trumps wisdom, beauty, and excellence. Let’s ignore the works of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Bach. No need to study the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.

Dennis Prayer explains: “Whereas the Columbia core curriculum originally set out to teach the history of the West and the best art and literature that has been produced, the Left has succeeded in teaching that no art is better than any other.” It does this by promoting multiculturalism.

What was the reaction to this student’s complaints? As I mentioned in a previous commentary, most faculty and administration are cowards. The director of the core curriculum sided with the student but explained that you just have to learn to grow up learning about racist views.

You have to wonder what is worse: a student who thinks she is traumatized by studying history or a professor who is sympathetic with such an idea.

Recently on my radio program I told the story of Charles Napier to illustrate a principle about ethics. Many of my guests had never heard the story. It bears repeating since it also has application to a recent news story.

General Charles Napier was the British commander in colonial India. He is perhaps best known for his response to Hindu priests. They came to him complaining about the British prohibition against sati. That is the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband. Some threw themselves on the burning wood willingly. Many were forced to do so.

William Napier the brother of Charles Napier recorded his response to these Hindu priests. “This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

Charles Napier didn’t play around. He merely said that if you throw a widow onto a funeral pyre, we will hang you. Don’t tell me your culture permits this. It is wrong.

I thought about this the other day when reading about our country’s willingness to prosecute a member of special forces because he stopped an Afghan commander from sexually abusing a boy who was chained to his bed as a sex slave. Actually, he did more than stop him. He beat the daylights out of him.

The U.S. military apparently ordered soldiers to turn a blind eye to this aspect of Afghan “culture.” Let’s be clear. Child sexual abuse is not “culture.” What the military needs these days is another Charles Napier who is willing to end this Afghan custom.

If you do an online search on the term “Christian terrorism” you will find that lots of people on the Left are using the term. It was already popular on many blogs and websites before the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado. Now the use of the term has exploded on the Internet.

In the past, the examples usually cited for Christian terrorism were people like Timothy McVeigh. That really doesn’t work since he claimed to be an agnostic and never claimed that the Bible or the words of Jesus were his inspiration for blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma.

I’ve heard some try to argue that Adolf Hitler was a Christian. He was not, and actually hated Christianity. The emotionally disturbed man who killed people near the Planned Parenthood clinic wasn’t a Christian either. But that hasn’t stopped lots of leftists from claiming that the shooting is another example of Christian terrorism.

If we do take these claims at face value, it creates a bigger problem for politicians who continually tell us that radical terrorists have no connection to Islam. The president and former secretary of state tell us that ISIS and other terrorist organizations have “nothing whatsoever” to do with Islam. So where is their condemnation of the phrase “Christian terrorism”?

Remember when President Obama spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast? He said Christians should not get on their “high horses” about Muslim atrocities because Christians nearly a thousand years ago were involved in the Crusades. Of course this makes my point. By laying the sins of Christian crusaders at the feet of Christians today, he implies that the Muslims bear some responsibility for that brutality of ISIS and other radical Muslim groups today. This is the problem when you start using the rhetorical tactic of “guilt by association.”

I might also add that modern Christianity is not struggling with the Crusades, but Muslims today are struggling with the Islamic terrorism. Christian terrorism is a fiction. Radical Muslim terrorism is an unfortunate fact.

Yesterday I talked about student demands and campus commotion over issues ranging from political correctness to microagressions. You might have wondered what college professors were doing about all of this. You wouldn’t be the only people wondering why the adults on campus have been so silent.

Alan Dershowitz is a former Harvard Law professor. He served in that capacity for fifty years, and had some strong words for what he felt were cowardly professors. He proudly labels himself as a progressive when he has been on my radio program and has been a well-known civil liberties attorney. He might be inclined to agree with some of the student demands but he also is very critical of professors and the administration of these schools.

He says that the “last thing administrators or faculty want to do is get into fights with minority students, because then they’re perceived as being racists and sexists and homophobes, and these are epithets that are hard to respond to. So it’s easier to go with the flow and be popular, particularly with the most vocal students.”

David French is a Harvard Law graduate who has defended student rights on campus. In a recent column he reminds us that the student movements on campus today are “enabled by weakness and empowered by cowardice.” Only the emotionally weak would accept the idea that students are traumatized by dissenting views. And he believes professors are cowards. “Push a professor, even slightly, and it’s likely he’ll fold. Demand faculty support for your protest, and dozens will rush to join.”

He concludes that these are not times that try men’s souls (which is the opening sentence from Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis). Instead, they are times when we have men without chests (which is a reference to a famous C.S. Lewis essay on The Abolition of Man). Obviously it is time for presidents and professors to grow a backbone and stop some of the silliness on campus.

As the fall semester is beginning to wind down, let’s catalog some of the student demands and the university campus commotions. Leading the list was the University of Missouri.

Racial tensions reached such a peak that University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe abruptly resigned. Apparently he didn’t act swiftly enough about two allegations of racial name-calling (which took place on a campus with over 35,000 students).

Students at Princeton ended their 32-hour sit-in when the president of Princeton University signed an agreement that will probably result in removing the name Woodrow Wilson off of school buildings (because he supported segregation). While we are talking about Ivy League schools, Yale and Princeton students objected to the centuries-long tradition of calling college heads “masters.” Apparently it sounds too much like slavery. Perhaps the next target will be master’s degrees.

A Washington State University professor said she would lower the grade of any student who used the term “illegal immigrants” to refer to any immigrant in this country illegally. The University of California at Irvine student government passed a resolution banning the display of the American flag.

But please don’t say that political correctness has taken over the university campus. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has declared the phrase “politically correct” a microagression. Many university professors and students are demanding that gender-specific pronouns (like he or she) be eliminated for new gender-neutral forms. And don’t forget the students at Johns Hopkins University that said that having Chick-fil-A on campus would be a microagression because the company’s CEO believes in traditional marriage.

All of this is a prelude to what may unfold on campus next semester. Unfortunately we will be hearing lots more about microagressions and the need for safe spaces on campus.