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Home | Wire | There Are Fewer School Shootings Now Than During the 1990s
There Are Fewer School Shootings Now Than During the 1990s
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TAGS Legal SystemU.S. History
03/01/2018Ryan McMaken
Now that I have several children, I’m often in the company of other parents who talk about the way things “used to be.” When the issue of child safety comes up, I hear parents sadly shake their heads and say things like “it’s not like it was when we were kids … the world is so much more dangerous now.”
Usually, the sentiment behind this idea is that there are more murders now than there used to be.
Now, I’m not exactly known for being a Pollyanna, but I am willing to admit when things are not, in fact, getting worse.
And when it comes to things like homicides, there is no evidence that things are getting worse. It is indeed true that things aren’t like they were “when we were kids,” but that’s a good thing. There were far more homicides in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s than there are today. Things were even worse than that during the 1970s. In fact, the homicide rate in the US was cut in half between 1991 and 2014. And while the homicide rate has inched up over the past two years, it is nowhere near where it was “when we were kids.”
For anyone familiar with these trends, it should not be a shock to hear that a subset of those homicides — school shootings — have decreased over that period as well.
In response to the latest shooting in Florida, Northeastern University released a preview of new research by James Alan Fox slated for publication this fall which shows, quite clearly, that there is no growing trend in school shootings. The university notes:
Mass school shootings are incredibly rare events. In research publishing later this year, Fox and doctoral student Emma Fridel found that on average, mass murders occur between 20 and 30 times per year, and about one of those incidents on average takes place at a school.
Fridel and Fox used data collected by USA Today, the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, Congressional Research Service, Gun Violence Archive, Stanford Geospatial Center and Stanford Libraries, Mother Jones, Everytown for Gun Safety, and a NYPD report on active shooters.
Their research also finds that shooting incidents involving students have been declining since the 1990s.
Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.
“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.
In a February 22 article, New York Magazine came to a similar conclusion, noting:
Schools …read more
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