There are 115,000 schools in the united states. 107 incidents halfway through the year, so 214 approximately by the end of the year, comes out to .19 percent chance of this happening at your school, but that’s only if you assume that it’s evenly distributed, which it certainly is not. I’d guess that if you are in an inner city school with the associated higher crime rates, then your risk is much higher.
But also if you look at numbers of deaths, school shootings isn’t even on the charts. Homicide deaths in general are in second place (but close to suicide deaths) at 10 out of 100,000 kids, and school shootings are a tiny fraction of that. There are 43 million adolescents (10-19) in the united states, so 29 deaths are about .7 percent of the total homicide deaths. Or put another way, your kid is 150 TIMES more likely to die from a regular homicide than from a school shooting.
But still, there is some small risk of a shooting happening and you wanting to know if your kid is safe. So I guess the question is if the tradeoff is worth it. Seems to me like that would not be a good reason not to ban cell phones. Like there might be reasons a cell phone ban is a bad idea, but that isn’t really one of them.
I feel like school shooters are rare enough that a policy about cell phones wouldn’t need to factor them in.
There have already been 107 incidents of gunfire on school grounds since the beginning of the year, including one in Los Angeles.
29 dead, 61 injured.
https://everytownresearch.org/maps/gunfire-on-school-grounds/
There are 115,000 schools in the united states. 107 incidents halfway through the year, so 214 approximately by the end of the year, comes out to .19 percent chance of this happening at your school, but that’s only if you assume that it’s evenly distributed, which it certainly is not. I’d guess that if you are in an inner city school with the associated higher crime rates, then your risk is much higher.
But also if you look at numbers of deaths, school shootings isn’t even on the charts. Homicide deaths in general are in second place (but close to suicide deaths) at 10 out of 100,000 kids, and school shootings are a tiny fraction of that. There are 43 million adolescents (10-19) in the united states, so 29 deaths are about .7 percent of the total homicide deaths. Or put another way, your kid is 150 TIMES more likely to die from a regular homicide than from a school shooting.
But still, there is some small risk of a shooting happening and you wanting to know if your kid is safe. So I guess the question is if the tradeoff is worth it. Seems to me like that would not be a good reason not to ban cell phones. Like there might be reasons a cell phone ban is a bad idea, but that isn’t really one of them.