With the Parkland shooting last week that occurred at a public school and involved 17 innocent children taken from this world much too soon, the topic of gun control has reemerged. Some have proposed "fighting fire with fire" by arming teachers with guns. This was part of the NRA's National School Shield Plan from 2013, so it is not as if this were a brand new idea. The state of Kentucky recently introduced a bill to arm teachers and administrations. The premise behind this idea is to provide training, practice, and advice directly related to a school shooting scenario in order to minimize the carnage unleashed during a school shooting. It is seen as an alternative to schools that cannot not afford to have police officers or other security guards on the school premises. I want to see whether or not this would be a good use of taxpayer dollars, but first, I want to see how prevalent school shootings are.
I bring up prevalence because in order to assess a problem and what are justifiable costs and benefits, we need to know how frequent it is happening. After the Parkland shooting, school shootings in the United States are being branded as "a new normal." The anti-gun organization Everytown for Gun Safety put out a statistic that the United States has already experienced 18 school shootings this year. Considering that we're not even two months into 2018, that sounds like a lot. The problem is that the statistic was inaccurate as it was sensationalist, and the Washington Post and Politifact called them out on it. So how prevalent are they?
Prevalence of Gun Homicides and Mass Shootings
It makes sense to ask how prevalent mass shootings in general are since some mass shootings are also school shootings. Plus, schools are the second most common site for mass shootings (FBI). Since the Parkland shooting was both a mass shooting and a school shooting, I will be looking at the prevalence of both.
It is a point I first brought up in 2012 and again in 2016: mass shootings are an uncommon form of gun-related death. The CDC's National Vital Statistics System found in their most recent report on fatalities (2015) that gun homicides do not make the Top Ten list for leading causes of death. In 2016, gun-related homicides increased from 12,979 in 2015 to 14,415 in 2016 (see CDC WISQARS database). Homicide rates did increase in 2016, but a preliminary review of 2017 data shows a decrease in homicide rates. Since most homicides in the United States are committed with guns, it is reasonable to assume that gun-related deaths also dropped in 2017. This brings us to mass shootings.
In its piece on mass shootings (updated after the Parkland shooting), Washington Post breaks down the historical demographics of mass shootings. Washington Post admits that mass shootings are a small portion of overall gun deaths. In 2018 so far, there have been 21 deaths from mass shootings and 1,827 gun deaths. For 2018, that would mean 1 percent of gun deaths are from mass shootings. However, that is just for two months, which is hardly an adequate timeframe to define a "new norm." The Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report on mass shootings from 1999 to 2013. Using the FBI's definition of mass shooting as "multiple-homicide incident with four people killed within a single event," CRS found that there have been an average of 21 mass shootings annually, and that there has not been a particular increase in this time period (see below). The Left-leaning Mother Jones uses this criterion (along with some others) in its open source database.
Comparing across nations is also interesting. As CNN brings up in a recent article, from 1966 to 2012, the United States accounts for 5 percent of the population and 31 percent of the mass shootings. The Crime Prevention Research Center does something interesting with the international data. They compare the United States to Europe by using death rates per million and frequency per million, and found that the United States is not at the top of the list.
Mass shootings are infrequent, but are terrifying not just because of the number killed, but also because they take place without advanced warning and in places we would not expect. One of those unexpected places is in a school, which brings me to my next point......
School Shooting Prevalence
Now that we have looked at gun homicide statistics and mass shooting statistics, let's take a brief look at school shooting data. The data I found did not segment by number of deaths in the school shootings the same the data are segmented with mass shootings, so I won't make that distinction. As for prevalence, here is what I could find: I'm normally not a fan of using Wikipedia as a source. In this case, they provide a good listing of school shootings in the United States. We see an increase of school shooting deaths in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s and beyond. 150,000 students have experienced a school shooting since Columbine.
This sheds some light on the raw data, but how about the rate at which school shootings happen? At the very least, we need to adjust for population growth over time. The Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics [NCES] provides an annual report called Indicators of School Crime and Safety. In its most recent report, we see a breakdown of deaths in schools (see below). What NCES concludes is that from 1992 to 2014, school shootings have accounted for less than 3 percent of overall youth homicides (NCES, 2016, p. 37). Just as interesting, the Cato Institute looked through NCES data to calculate what percentage of schools undergo a school shooting. As of 2014, only 0.009 percent of schools have historically undergone a school shooting. In terms of percent of children killed, only 0.000044 percent of children are murdered in a homicide at school. In its 2016 fact sheet on Understanding School Violence, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that "school associated violent deaths are rare." How rare? According to 2012 CDC research, the CDC found that the probability of a child being a victim of a school-related homicide is 1 in 2.5 million. Even if you were to argue that school shootings have been twice as prevalent since then (which is generous to assume), that would still mean only a probability of 1 in 1.25 million, which would mean that a child would be about 10 times more likely to be struck by lightning and 17 times more likely to die in a car accident.
Globally, the best data we have is from the Academy for Critical Incident Analysis. This Academy aggregated data from each incident where there were two or more victims. From 2000 to 2010, 28 out of 57 incidents happened in the United States alone. When it comes to mass shootings that are school shootings, the United States has a bigger problem than other countries. Nevertheless, school shootings remain a small percentage of youth homicides in the United States, as well as a statistically rare occurrence.
Should We Arm Teachers in Response to School Shootings?
I don't want to get into whether there are too many school shootings. Given the horrific nature of the crime and the fact that the victims are children and school staff, I'm sure we can all agree that one school shooting is too many. For argument's sake, let us assume that the prevalence of school shootings is high enough where we need to take some drastic action, such as arming teachers. While the idea has some intuition behind it, I have a few issues (also see Center for Homicide Research paper here):
- Cost of arming teachers. Per the NRA's 2013 report, one-time training costs $800 to $1,000. To be generous, let's assume $800. NCES estimates that there are 3.592 million teachers in 2018. 30 percent of Americans own a gun (Pew Research). Only 61 percent of firearm owners have had training (Reuters). Assuming that the demographics of U.S. firearms owners applies to teachers, 657,336 teachers have had training, which means that we would need to train 2.93 million teachers. That would mean that the cost of training these 2.93 million teachers would cost $2.3 billion nationwide. This does not consider that training would need to be ongoing, the cost of purchasing the handguns, the permits for these handguns, and the storage and insurance for the handguns. Many schools already have strained budgets. Can schools afford such a measure?
- Storage of firearms. It is not just the cost of the storage that concerns me. Where are the teachers going to store their firearms? If the storage area is too heavily guarded, it would be too difficult to access in the event of a school shooting. If it is too easy to access, there is legitimate concern that someone could steal the firearms.
- Success rate of hitting target and casualties. When I was covering the topic of the inadequacy behind a high-capacity magazine ban, I brought up how police officers hit their target 30 percent of the time. Even if teachers are trained, it is a reasonable assumption that their success rate would be lower than that of a police officer. Why? Because teachers are not accustomed to such scenarios like police officers and security guards are. Combine that with a bunch of students potentially in the line of fire, I cannot imagine how this would end well. It is difficult enough for a police officer to hit their target. How can we expect a teacher with minimal to no training to do the job?
- Teacher pressure and turnover rates. On average, the United States experiences an attrition rate of about 2 percent (BLS). The Department of Education's NCES found that about 17 percent of teachers quit teaching within 5 years, which is below the commonly believed 50 percent. In spite of the lower attrition rate, teachers still face a number of priorities, including grading, academic commitments, curriculum planning, mentoring students, and meetings. With everything else teachers have to manage, you want to throw gun training and keeping track of a gun on top of it?
Postscript
It is important to make sure our children are safe while in school. At the same time, it is not the job of the teacher to defend students. It is their job to teach. That is what they are trained to do. Having a jerk-knee response to a phenomenon that has not particularly been on the rise is a poor use of resources and a way to let fear override better judgement. Arming teachers is a way to cut corners, especially given the potential lethalness of the government funding teachers to carry firearms while in school.
And let's not forget about prevalence. Government statistics show that school shootings are rare, even if they are more common than in other countries. School shootings account for a small percentage of youth homicides, and mass shootings account for a small percentage of firearm homicides. We should keep the prevalence in mind as we make policy priorities. This is not a call to discontinue the discussion on gun reform, but rather a call for more effective and targeted way to reduce gun deaths than arming teachers.
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