The Department of Education Wildly Overestimates the Number of School Shootings
Canada Officials React to Trump’s NAFTA Remarks: We’re ‘Not There Yet’
Police Report: Beto O’Rourke Tried to Flee Scene of Drunk-Driving Crash
All Betos Are Off
Fixing the Kangaroo Courts
Racial Widgets
Democrats and Their Big Labor Allies Stick It to Home-Care Workers in Pa.
The Dumb Effort to Paint DeSantis as a Racist
FBI Arrests Calif. Man for Threatening Boston Globe over Trump Editorials
Andrew Gillum Would Be a Disaster as Florida Governor
The National Implications of Oklahoma’s GOP Primary
DOJ Sides with Plaintiffs Alleging Harvard Discriminates against Asians
Cuomo: ICE Is ‘A Bunch of Thugs’
How Ocasio-Cortez Makes the Case against Socialism
A Saw about a Hammer
Bishop: ‘We All Knew’ of McCarrick’s Abuse
The Truth Will Set Us All Free
U.S.
The Department of Education Wildly Overestimates the Number of School Shootings
By David French
August 28, 2018 2:22 PM
School buses drive past Santa Fe High School on the morning of the first day of class since a deadly mass shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, May 29, 2018. (Pu Ying Huang/Reuters)
This mistake highlights two things, one related to the challenge of school security, the other to the perception of public risk.
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.
But then along comes the Department of Education to amplify everyone’s fears. Last spring it declared that “nearly 240 schools . . . reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” This number blew through everyone’s estimates, including Everytown’s. Indeed, extrapolated over five years, it would triple Everytown’s.
Well, I have good news: The DOE’s estimate appears to be wildly exaggerated. NPR committed an act of journalism in the first degree and actually contacted each of the schools that reported a shooting to the DOE. It “found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/education-department-school-shootings-statistics-wildly-overestimates-truth/