In response to the Robb Elementary School shooting in Texas this week, one now sees repeated claims that school shootings are somehow “normal” or common in the United States.
For example, social media at this moment is teeming with users—assuming they’re not bots—posting about how they’re absolutely terrified of the idea of allowing their children to attend school. Yesterday, in a now deleted post, Elizabeth Bruenig—notable for writing on the topic of millennials having babies—declared that one reason millennials don’t have babies is because they believe their children are likely to be killed in a school shooting. Bruenig compared sending children to school to a sort of “lottery” system in which your child’s time to be killed in a shooting may come up at any time.
Some Europeans were eager to get in on the action also. El País, one of Spain’s largest dailies, presented “school shootings as a US norm.”
This is a pretty odd claim, however, given that school shootings are so rare that in the United States in 2021 there was one school-shooting death for every twenty-three million Americans. By comparison, approximately one in 350,000 Americans drowns each year.
If one is going to be “terrified” of the dangers one’s children face, obsessing over school shootings is a rather odd thing to focus on. Our children are far, far more likely to be killed in an automobile accident than in a school shooting. Note, however, that no one in Washington is talking about highway deaths. Why is this?
The reason for the laser-like focus on an extremely rare phenomenon, however, is easy enough to explain. Many people genuinely believe—wrongly—that their children live in the shadow of school shootings. For gun control advocates, that’s all for the best, since this false narrative can be used to push more legislation.
Moreover, gun control advocates focus so much on school shootings because they contend—whether earnestly or cynically—that changing just a few laws will end school shootings. To believe such claims, however, we’d need to see some evidence not only that such laws reduce homicides overall, but that they also reduce homicides specific to schools. Secondly, these laws would have to work so well that they’d be worth the enormous costs to society—costs brought on by the drug war–like enforcement measures that such laws would entail. And in the meantime, far more widespread causes of child mortality won’t enjoy much attention in Washington because those awful things can’t be turned into a gun control campaign.
On the other hand, more practical and attainable solutions directly related to school security will be ignored.
School Shootings Are Incredibly RareFar from being a “norm” in American society, school shootings are a tiny subset of homicides which are themselves not exactly a leading cause of death in the United States. For example, there were approximately 16,700 homicides in the United States in 2019. That’s a rate of about five victims per 100,000 people. (By comparison, more than 100,000 Americans die of diabetes each year.)
Of those 16,700 homicides in 2019, 17 were due to shootings at K–12 schools. That means school shootings were 0.1 percent of all homicides and school-shooting deaths occurred at a rate of 0.005 per 100,000 Americans.
Some of the worst years for school shootings have placed homicides in the range of 20 to 30 deaths. Excluding 1927, the year of the Bath Consolidated School incident (which was a bombing rather than a shooting), 2018 was likely the deadliest year for schools, with 39 shooting victims. Twenty twelve—the year of the Sandy Hook shootings—was the second-deadliest year. Twenty twenty-two will likely be among the worst single years for school shootings, with at least 28 deaths.
. . .
Are the nation’s children in some kind of ghoulish shooting lottery? The data suggests policy makers should be far more concerned about children dying due to drunk-driving incidents, car accidents in general, suicide, drowning, cancer, or child abuse. Given the scarcity of the resources that can be devoted to addressing the dangers of the world, it only makes sense to put efforts toward those measures that are actually likely to save lives. In the worst years, we’re witnessing around thirty deaths due to school shootings. That’s 0.000009 percent of the American population. I’m not saying that’s something we shouldn’t care about at all. But it is an odd thing around which to craft national policy or to think should prompt national “soul searching.”
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
