Thanksgiving Dinner Banter: Five facts on school shootings
When your least favorite uncle starts quoting cable news, here are a few factual counterpoints.
Thanksgiving conversation this year will be probably be morbid. Israel and Gaza. Ukraine. Global climate crisis. Inflation. 2024 Presidential election. There is a full platter of global crises heaped higher than a $90 turkey.
For the first time in history, there is agreement and common ground between children, teens, college students, and parents. They all rank school shootings as their top safety concern. When so many people at the dinner table care about school safety and gun violence, it’s a topic that will probably be mentioned before your second plate. For 38,200 American families, there will be an empty seat at the table this year because of gun violence.
When school shootings awkwardly make their way into conversation, here are a couple talking points to break through conjecture and get to the facts.
Fact #1: This year is worse than any other year
There have already been more shootings at schools this year than there were last year.
2022 was a record high and 20% increase from 2021
2023 is projected to be 15% higher than 2022
The number of shootings at schools in 2023 is 10x higher than the yearly average from 1966-2017.
Fact #2: Swatting is a big problem too
More than 600 schools have been swatted this year. Swatting (for anyone who doesn’t know) is making false 911 calls to cause panic and trigger a large police response. In most swatting scenarios, someone makes an elaborate report--shooting in progress with multiple people shot, bombs inside a venue, hostage situation--to dispatch the highest priority police response.
In the spring 2023, an autodialer called 911 and played prerecorded messages about the school shooting in progress. These hoaxes targeted up to 30 schools in the same state at roughly the same time. For the first time since last spring, multiple schools in Kentucky/Ohio and Southern California were hit with simultaneous swatting calls in the last two weeks.
More than a year into this swatting problem, there is an established pattern and each instance that generates +100 officers responding to these hoaxes is perpetuating the cycle.
We don’t have the power to stop someone in a foreign country from making 911 calls over the internet. We do have the power to decide how we respond to them.
Fact #3: Gun free school zones work
A popular talking point on cable news is that shooters target “gun free zones” because gun toting citizens aren’t there to protect innocent people.
The first peer-reviewed study of gun free school zones was published this week.
The objective of this study was to use a cross-sectional, multi-group controlled ecological study design in St. Louis, MO city that compared the counts of crimes committed with a firearm occurring in gun-free school zones compared to a contiguous area immediately surrounding the gun-free school zone (i.e., gun-allowing zones) in 2019. Gun-free school zones were measured and analyzed in two ways. In the primary analysis, boundaries of the tax parcels were used for each school as the beginning of the gun-free school zone. Results from this analysis, after adjustment for pair-matching and confounding, were null. In the secondary analysis, gun-free school zones were measured as beginning at the geographic centroid of the school’s address. After adjusting for the pair-matching and confounding, this analysis showed 13.7% significantly fewer crimes committed with a firearm in gun-free school zones compared to gun-allowing zones. These results suggest that gun-free school zones are not being targeted for firearm crime in St. Louis, MO.
Fact #4: We really don’t know what happened
Looking at the 10 highest profile school shootings since 2018. We don’t really know what happened because official reports and timelines are never released.
Were there chances to stop the shooter? We don’t know.
Did teachers and student take shelter in the safest places? We don’t know.
Could EMS get to the wounded victims faster? We don’t know.
What can other schools do better next time? We don’t know.
We don’t know this critical information because police department don’t want admit fault and school officials try to settle privately instead of documenting failures.
Fact #5: No big changes
There have been 1,216 shootings at schools since Parkland. These shootings continue to happen because there is no meaningful action taken to prevent them.
Summing it up
The most effective way to prevent school shootings are crisis intervention programs, red flag laws to keep guns away from people in crisis, and safe gun storage laws so that children and teens don’t take guns to school.
Have a happy Thanksgiving and hopefully this article can be the only time you think about school shootings today.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.