According to a recent Gallup poll, 44% of parents are worried about their child's safety at school, a level of fear not seen since the Columbine shooting. Though this anxiety stems from news reports of school shootings, these statistics can be misleading, writes criminologist James Allen Fox, for Dallas News. The K-12 School Shooting Database, for instance, recorded 349 incidents in 2023—almost three times the number in 2018. Though the numbers are accurate, what constitutes a school shooting surely does not align with what parents are thinking. That's because that data includes shootings that take place inside school as well as outside on school grounds, not only during school hours but also on evenings or weekends -- and it also include those shootings that result in injury or death, as well as those in which no one is harmed and that victimize students or school personnel as well as those having no connection to the school.
From 2018 to 2023, the K-12 database recorded over 1,200 school shootings, with slightly more than half resulting in injury or death. But of the more than 600 shootings involving victim injuries or fatalities, one-quarter occurred during school hours and only 11% took place inside the confines of the school building. It's especially noteworthy that 9 out of 10 school shootings involving casualties happen on school grounds — at school but not in school. The overwhelming majority of the frightening tally of school shootings has no relevance to most of the security measures that parents and politicians advocate, like metal detectors, locks on classroom doors and lockdown drills. With an average of about 19 student fatalities per year out of 50 million students, children are far more likely to die from drowning than from school shootings. Notably, there were only 13 active shooter incidents in schools during this period, causing 65 deaths, making such events rare compared to the number of schools. Despite their rarity, these incidents fuel fear and frequent, often unrealistic safety drills. "Our overemphasis on school shootings by both word and deed has had the counterproductive effect of scaring students about something that in all likelihood will not happen," Fox writes.
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