A common trope about US Schools is that they are shooting ranges, and that children in the US are in mortal peril from mass shootings. Other anti-US rhetoric commonly accompanies these claims.
We are told that Americans are more likely to die from a parachuting accident, being buried alive, a lightning strike, drowning in your bathtub or choking on food than from a terrorist attack, so they shouldn't worry about the risk of terrorist attacks. And that since the risk is so low, anyone who might be worried about terrorism, you're Islamophobic. And that Muslims are demonised for these rare terrorist attacks because they're an outgroup.
Given how much attention is placed on mass shootings at schools, one might be given to suspect that the numbers there might be similarly inflated.
So let us compare deaths of school students in mass shootings at schools to an American cause of death that most would consider banal.
Cows.
In a 2024 article published in Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology, Death and injuries caused by cattle: A forensic overview, Roger Byard informs us that "It has been estimated that approximately 20–22 deaths occur each year in the United States from cattle". Note that this is total deaths.
Meanwhile, in another 2024 article published in Pediatrics, School Shootings in the United States: 1997–2022, Rapa et al. inform us that "On average then, over the 25-year time span examined, there were approximately 5 fatalities and 5 injuries per school year that could be attributed to school mass shootings".
So about 4 times as many Americans die every year due to cows as in school mass shootings. Note that strictly speaking, the school mass shooting data includes adults as it is for all fatalities. It is safe to assume that most of them are students, as the majority of people in schools are students, but still this number somewhat overestimates the number of school students in the US who die from school mass shootings - yet we still get this seemingly shocking result.
Perhaps one might object by claiming that there're more school shootings nowadays, so newer data will show more kids dying in school mass shootings. So let us more generously test the claim.
School shootings are not evenly distributed across years. From the same paper, here is Figure 3: U.S. School Mass Shootings by School Year: Number of Fatalities and Number Injured, 1997-1998 through 2021-2022.
One can see that in the majority of years, there are no fatalities or even injuries from school mass shooting.
But for the sake of argument, let us cherry pick years to get the maximum number of deaths from school mass shootings. In school year 2017-2018 27 people died in them, and in 2021-2022 25 did. None died in the intervening years, so we get 52 deaths across 5 years, or 10.4 deaths a year.
This is still half the number of Americans who died due to cows every year.
Clearly, the amount of froth generated by school mass shootings cannot be attributed to the number of deaths alone.
Of course, if you apply the left's dismissal of jihadist terrorism and apply the same logic to their demonisation of guns and (white) gun owners that always accompanies school mass shootings, they will not like the results.
