In the past two years, school districts in eight California communities and in Topeka, Kan., Gainesville, Fla., and Granite, Utah have approved their use. The Compton, California school district drew headline news recently when it joined the parade of school districts that authorized its police to pack these high caliber battlefield-style killing weapons. The danger and absurdity of school officials’ rush to arm their school police to the teeth is that there is absolutely no need for these weapons.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics did a 10-year study, from 2002 to 2011, of mass shootings in America. It found that less than one-fifth of one percent of all shootings in the country involved four or more victims. Let’s fine tune this more. Noted criminologist James Alan Fox crunched the numbers on shootings on all school campuses in the nation and found that less than one percent of all shootings involved multiple victims. Let’s fine tune the numbers even more: the Centers for Disease Control, in two separate reports on K-12 school shootings, found that the chance of a child dying in school in any given year from a homicide or suicide was less than one in one in one million in the early 1990s and one in two million in the later 1990s. This probability has remained unchanged in the decade since. The numbers and percentages tell one glaring fact. Despite the horror, hysteria, and media sensationalism over the Newtown and Columbine massacres, mass shootings in America’s schools are not just rare, but rarer than ever.