Exploiting an anomaly
“How many K-12 students do you think have died in mass school shootings in the U.S. in the last 40 years?” I asked an attorney friend over the holiday weekend.
“Gosh,” he mused, “a couple thousand, maybe?”
He was guessing, naturally. Likely as not, his estimate was based on recollecting recent headlines out of Texas and the voluminous reaction in commentary, possibly trying to factor it across four decades.
Learning the true answer—98 mass school shooting K-12 student deaths since 1982, including Uvalde—he was surprised.
You may be, too. The noisiness and sloppy journalism of today’s media coverage can certainly make it seem like mass school shootings are happening often, at an increasing rate.
The factual number comes from data compiled by progressive magazine Mother Jones and reported by Time.com
(the MoJo study defined a mass shooting as one in which at least three people were killed).
There was only one such K-12 shooting in 2021, in which four students were killed. There were none at all in 2020 or 2019.
In 2018, a total of 22 students were killed in two separate school shootings, one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and the other at Santa Fe High School in Texas.
All told, there have been seven K-12 mass school shootings this century, and a dozen going back through 1982, the first data year of the Mother Jones analysis. Of those 12, four featured firearms in so-called “assault rifle” style.
If mass shootings on college campuses are added in, the student fatality total since 1982 rises to 148. Interestingly, all six of the university mass shootings since 1982 were perpetrated with handguns.
To get a grasp of just how much of an anomaly fatal K-12 mass school shootings are—and the statistically tiny risk they pose to any student or child—consider their rarity against the gigantic universe of opportunity.
For the past 40 years, between 40 and 50 million children in the U.S. have attended K-12 classes every single weekday over a 180-day scholastic year in more than 131,000 schools. That equates to 8 or 9 billion student-days every year, or somewhere between 320 and 360 billion chances for a student to be killed in a mass shooting at her school since 1982. Out of all those incalculable billions of chances over four decades, fewer than 100 K-12 students actually met that fate.
Yet more than 25 times as many students died just last year from suicide; since 1982 it might be 1,000 times as many. And 40 times as many children under age 19 died last year in motor vehicle accidents; since 1982 total car-wreck deaths for kids run into the hundreds of thousands.
You don’t have to be a statistician to recognize or understand that a mass shooting at a K-12 school is among the most isolated of aberrations. And that the ensuing media frenzy is completely out of proportion to other risks and causes of death for children and adolescents that dwarf mass school shootings.
Education Week magazine called the mass shooting at Uvalde the “27th school shooting” of the year. But the omission of the word “mass” by EdWeek is misinformation at its worst.
Only two of the other 26 shootings happened inside a school, and both were characterized by authorities as gang- or group-related.
Most of the shootings EdWeek lists on its tracker were nonfatal and occurred in either parking lots or a school vehicle at large districts in high-crime cities: two shootings each in Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and Baltimore, plus incidents in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Birmingham, Miami and Milwaukee. Two of the shootings were accidental discharges.
Another surprise: The dozen most deadly school massacres in world history all occurred in places few Americans can name or even pronounce: Iquique; Beslan, North Ossetia-Alania; Chenkalady; Peshawar; Garissa; Kabul; Jaffna; Poso, Central Sulawesi; Machakos County; Sanam Luang; Mullaitivu; and Aleppo.
Not all of those massacres were slaughter by firearms, it’s true (as if that would ease a grieving parent’s mind)—three involved bombings and one was an act of arson. They also aren’t all ancient history; three of them happened in 2014, 2015 and 2021, resulting in the deaths of 387 students and staff.
Better perspective on data doesn’t lessen the tragedy of mass school shooting crimes, of course. Cold facts are not comforting. Nevertheless, policy should be driven by facts.
Thankfully, incidents like Uvalde are true anomalies in the U.S., more rare than lightning strikes. But just as increased cockpit security and armed marshals on board made jet airliners safer, prudent school security enhancements can help prevent them and should be tried. So can more red-flag laws for students displaying mental instability.
What won’t help is exploiting an anomaly politically instead of tackling much more common—and far more deadly—risks and challenges to our children.
Correction
Last week, I inadvertently added to Phil Magness’ bibliography when I said he had written a book in response to the book-length version of The 1619 Project. What he wrote was a book review (albeit a lengthy one). I regret the error.