Any credible doctor will say that having the right diagnosis is important. If a patient receives the wrong diagnosis, he is almost certain to begin the wrong treatment.
That can mean not just that the patient doesn’t get any better, but that the “treatment” actively harms him. Imagine, for example, starting chemotherapy for a broken leg.
Unfortunately, one year after the tragic loss of 17 lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, many lawmakers and advocacy groups still insist on offering ineffective measures to prevent school shootings based on a misguided diagnosis of the problem.
They continue to declare that the U.S. is suffering from an epidemic of school shootings and other types of gun-related violence directed at the nation’s students, despite clear evidence to the contrary.
Worse, they claim that the real problem is the prevalence of firearms and demand that law-abiding Americans be subjected to increasingly drastic measures to combat this alleged epidemic.
The Wrong Diagnosis
The U.S. isn’t suffering from a school shooting epidemic.
Parkland-style shootings, while devastating, remain extraordinarily rare events. Since 2010, there have been eight school shootings with two or more fatalities other than the shooter, for an average of one multiple-fatality shooting a year at the nation’s 100,000 public and private K-12 schools.
Many of these events were not “Parkland-style” attempted mass shootings, either. Every single one of these instances is certainly a tragedy, but that still amounts to far less than an “epidemic.”
The 2017-2018 school year saw an unusually high number of school shootings and firearm-related deaths on campus, but the current 2018-2019 school year has seen a return to the baseline.
In fact, so far, there has been exactly one firearm-related student homicide on a K-12 campus during school hours. It was the result of an interpersonal dispute between two students, and no one else was injured.
Further, the nation’s schools are trending toward becoming safer from violent deaths, not less safe. Four times as many students suffered violent deaths at school in the early 1990s than do students today.
Read the full story from The Daily Signal
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