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# K-12 kids killed (specifically in this case shot dead) at school in the U.S. in a given year / # K-12 kids total who go to school

This: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/demo/school-enrollme...

Makes it look like there are 55,548,000 K-12 kids enrolled in school in the U.S. in 2020

This: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01 Makes it look like there are between 12 and 35 homicides of kids 5-18 years of age at school per year in the years 1992-2019.

The average of 12 and 35 is 23.5, call it 24 kids on average murdered at school per year in the United States in recent years.

Note that this is not quite correct because it includes murders other than shootings, so it's a little inflated. But anyway.

Also note they say, "“At school” includes on the property of a functioning elementary or secondary school, on the way to or from regular sessions at school, and while attending or traveling to or from a school-sponsored event. In this indicator, the term “at school” is comparable in meaning to the term “school-associated." So again, it's going to be a little inflated because a bunch of these are going to be murders that people wouldn't intuitively understand to be a school shooting (e.g., kid murdered on the way to school in gang crossfire).

Okay, so 24 / 55,548,000 = 0.000043% chance per year of dying in a school shooting for a given U.S. child who attends school, all else being equal.

And of course, all else isn't equal. School shootings aren't random, and are much more common in the types of environments other shootings are common (poor cities, high % black populations, gangs, etc.).

For context, about 520 kids 5-19 die via drowning in the U.S. per year, making it about 22x the risk of being killed at school, all else being equal.

(https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/explore-data/explore/selected-y... for death by drowning)

Edit: this data makes it seem like 11.5 or so deaths per year rather than 24 (because it's shootings specifically, I think), and gives more colour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...




Thank you! I wonder how the other source calculated their answer




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