No one doubts the convulsive horror of a school shooting. Massacres in American classrooms are uniquely terrifying, and parents, politicians, and educators are right to mobilize to stop them. At the same time, each mass shooting raises a question: How violent are our schools, really? The worst shootings make the headlines, but do they reflect a widespread problem?
There are sources that will answer with an emphatic yes. For example, Everytown for Gun Safety maintains an expansive interactive database that asserts that since 2013 there have been “344 incidents of gunfire on school grounds†in the U.S. — a number that includes accidental discharges, suicides, fights in parking lots, and every other incident involving the discharge of a gun. The “school shootings†that all parents fear represent a tiny fraction of those 344 incidents, which suggests that the chances of any given school facing a spree killer are almost vanishingly small.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/education-department-school-shootings-statistics-wildly-overestimates-truth/
