Are Shootings More Likely to Occur in Public Schools?

The Parkland shooting, even almost  two months later, remains a very painful topic, and there seem to have been many very important factors at play. One that hasn’t been discussed very much, but probably needs to be examined, is whether the kind of schools students attend makes a difference. At least one author, Stella Morabito atThe Federalist,has discussed this, and has identified many problems that she thinks are associated with public schools ranging from their large sizes to their seeming hostility to Christianity.All of the problems she discusses may be factors —school size has been suspect for a long time—but as a starting point we ought to look at the numbers.Hyewon Kim —a Cato Center for Educational Freedom Intern—compiled information on school shootings in the United States from 2000 to 2018 using theTribune-Review database. The database is limited to legitimate school shootings; that is, shootings that occurred on or near a K-12 school campus while classes were in session or when students were present. The list also excluded suicide-only incidents.Hyewon found 134 school shootings from 2000 to 2018. Only eight of these occurred in private schools while 122 occurred in public schools. The type of school could not be definitively classified for 4 of the shootings. As shown in the figure below, about 94 percent of the shootings that could be classified occurred in public schools while only about 6 percent occurred in private schools. Since there are many ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs