Any shooting in a school – like any homicide, suicide, fatality or injury anywhere – unquestionably is a tragedy. For that very reason, we need to stop the self-defeating commentary about gun violence in schools. We've distorted the story and not told the whole truth: Gun violence in schools amounts to a fraction of gun violence in America. And, as a nation, we have been way too cowardly and way too silent about the more serious gun threats we face, including the fact that adults kill more kids than do teen-age schoolhouse gunmen.
Overly simplistic pundits such as The Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson and U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy blame shootings on “teenage angst” and “kids with broken brains.” Headlines from PBS, The Atlantic and other outlets (“Going to school scared for their lives,” “An era of school shootings,” etc.) are inflammatory.
Politicians, media talking heads and others have so fanned the flames on this subject that a Pew poll found that “a majority of U.S. teens fear a shooting could happen at their school.”
Here are the real odds. Some 47 million students attend 131,000 kindergarten through 12-grade schools across the United States for an average of 6.64 hours daily, 180 days per year. In the most recent pre-pandemic year, 2019, 32 fatal shootings, including all homicides, suicides and accidents, occurred at schools where students collectively spent 56 billion person-hours.
That works out to 0.6 fatal school shootings per billion hours that students spend in school. That rate is below the overall 1.7 fatal shootings per billion hours in Denmark, which has some of world’s strictest gun control laws, and the overall 13.7 fatal shootings per billion hours in the United States, which is infamous for having some of the world’s least restrictive gun control laws.
The average American student would have to attend an elementary or secondary school every school day for 1,000 years to experience any kind of a shooting (including all fatal, injurious and missed shots) in or around their school.
And, yet, some gun control advocates are praising journalist John Cox‘s recently released book, “Children Under Fire: An American Crisis,” despite Cox’s assertion, for example, that an adult is entitled to own “a dozen AR-15s” so long as that adult “prevent(s) his deadly weapons from falling into the hands of a child.”
What? A 64-year-old adult toting 14 assault rifles shot more people in Las Vegas in 10 minutes — Cox’s book devoted two sentences that massacre — than were shot in all 131,000 K-12 schools in four years.
Cox spends dozens of pages trashing schools as bullet-riddled hells that “millions of children” are terrified to attend.
Cox rails against “teenagers who slaughter children;” claims the “biggest threat to the safety of children in our country” is “punks with a gun and a grudge;” and argues that adults’ main challenge is to “separate the guns from the kids.”
What garbage.
Three in four under-18 homicide victims were killed by adults
In 2020, youthful assailants caused fewer than 5% of all homicides, the FBI’s crime clearance report shows. My analysis of FBI 2019 and 2020 data show just 27% of gun homicide victims under age 18 were murdered by peer children and youths; many more were shot by assailants 25 and older.
True, schools, like countries with strict gun controls are not perfect places; tragic shootings still occur, and more prevention is needed.
But an appalling level of gun violence throughout the United States maims and kills people young and old in homes, workplaces, on the streets, in parks, in supermarkets, etc. The fixation on gun violence in schools is scapegoating, sanctimony and self-indulgence masquerading as a legitimate discussion about our much larger, very real gun violence crisis.
Why, in reality, are American schools, comparatively speaking, safer from guns than the rest of society is? Two factors demand attention:
- First, the 5- to 17-year-olds who occupy our schools are uniquely unlikely to perpetrate shootings.
- Second, nearly all schools, ostensibly, are gun-free zones. They are proof of the effectiveness of stricter gun controls, signaling how we might better prevent gun violence among the adults who are much more likely than kids to commit it.
Roughly, 700 children and teens were murdered in in 2019, 80% of them by their parents, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “Child Maltreatment" report. Based on FBI estimates, there's a Sandy Hook-sized gun massacre of kids in American homes every couple of weeks.
We've underplayed the 2021 headlines capturing some of the hundreds of shootings of children and youths by adults, mainly their parents: “Father fatally shoots five children;” “Dad kills 2 teen daughters in murder-suicide;” “Father shoots 2 young sons, killing 1;” “Father kills 2 children in murder-suicide;” “Man charged in deadly shooting of 6-year-old;” “Teen girl shot by step-father has died;” “Man fatally shoots his two teenage daughters;" “Father shoots son, 3, daughter, 5”; “Maryland father shoots family (2017)”; “Phoenix father shoots, kills family"; “Colorado gun shop owner suspected of killing 2 children” ... on and on.
In recent years, amid the sensationalizing of school shootings, pro-gun lobbyists proposed what rightly was dismissed as a “colossally stupid” scheme to arm 700,000 school personnel with guns, making schools as dangerous as the rest of America. That likely would mean more school shootings — committed by and against principals, teachers, school safety officers, parents, students and others.
Here’s the real, science-based reframing that everyone on all sides of this debate should embrace: Let's stop disparaging schools as uniquely dangerous and, instead, examine their gun-free zones as models for a gun-toting country unable to address rampant gun violence.