Shorting and Covering ARE buy and sell action. It'
Post# of 22940
The SEC keeps an updated list that's posted aprox every month on their website.
There's a reason why shorting is regulated
http://www.sec.gov/foia/docs/failsdata.htm <~ at the bottom of the page, you can download the current data for January 2016. You can open it in a few different formats, I prefer excel, but notepad will work just fine. CTRL + F TPAC and you'll see that the later half of January resulted in 1,700,879. That IS a substantial amount, especially when you consider that it is likely even higher in Feb.
So yes, shorting DOES matter.