No, school shooting occurrences.
Hysteria and/or dishonesty destroys conversation. There are not hundreds of school shootings annually.
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2372966X.2020.1846458
Guns, School Shooters, and School Safety: What We Know and Directions for Change
PREVALENCE OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS
Shortly after the December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut, Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety (
www.everytown.org) began tracking incidents of gunfire on school property, providing a data resource that has garnered wide-ranging attention. Everytown included in their case listing a total of 361 shootings at schools and colleges from 2013 to 2018, averaging about one per week based on a full calendar year. However,
a breakdown of the Everytown cases displayed in Table 1 reveals that only 105 of the 361 incidents resulted in any injury, and 25 in any deaths, to students or adults confronted by an armed assailant in an elementary or secondary school. The remaining incidents, although not unimportant, include shootings at college campuses or such occurrences as suicide attempts, evening altercations on school grounds between adults with no connection to the school, and accidental or intentional gunfire that struck no one. In terms of fatalities, as shown in Table 2,
over the 6 years from 2013 to 2018 a total of 40 students in grades K–12 were killed by an assailant’s bullet including the 22 who were slain in the 2018 mass shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas. That total is out of the 55 million children enrolled in our nation’s primary and secondary schools, less than a one-in-a-million risk for any particular student over that time frame.
The location of school shootings also has implications for security planning. School grounds, buses, bus stops, and parking lots where students linger in the after-school hours can be vulnerable locations. However, half of the gunshot victims in the Everytown data were targeted outside the school building where measures such as metal detectors, armed guards, and even preparedness drills provide little help (Fox & Fridel,
2019). Many of these violent altercations occurred during school-sponsored athletic contests, especially those involving arch rivals.
Much of the fear and policy debate related to school shootings centers not so much on single homicides that often involve a specifically targeted victim, but on the most dreadful and high-profile incidents—such as Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Santa Fe—in which large numbers of students and faculty are killed in an indiscriminate fashion. These too are the episodes that dominate the fatality statistics.
However, our collective memories are limited, as many Americans believe this to be a new phenomenon impacting our nation’s schools. As shown in Table 3, the late 1990s witnessed more multiple-victim shootings, including four in one school year, than we have seen in recent years.
Table 3. Multiple-Victim School Shootings 1996–2018
Multiple-victim shootings dominate media headlines and drive the debate about school security (Berkowitz et al.,
2018). Yet, to a parent, it matters not whether a child is killed during a large-scale massacre or an isolated incident.
Figure 1 displays the long-term trend in fatal school gun assaults both in terms of the number of incidents and the aggregate number killed each year. Other than the spikes in deaths associated with Columbine (1998–1999), Sandy Hook (2012–2013), and both Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Santa Fe (2017–2018), the numbers trend downward.
If anything, schools are safer than they have been for decades (Modzeleski et al.,
2015). According the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice indicators report, schools have reported significant declines in serious violent crime at least over the past 15 years (Musu et al.,
2019). In fact, for some children, school is their safest place, offering structure and supervision that they may not enjoy elsewhere (Fox & Burstein,
2010).
Figure 1. Fatal Shootings in Primary and Secondary Schools
Sources: National School Safety Center and Centers for Disease Control.