Schools Are Safer Now Than In The 90s, Despite Shootings: Report

BOSTON, MA — The deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida has prompted calls for action on gun reform and many people concerned about what appears to be an uptick in school shootings. But Mass school shootings are incredibly rare events, according to a new study by James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern University. Not only that, but shooting incidents involving students have been declining since the 1990s, they found, the university reported this week.

“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” Fox told the news magazine at Northeastern.

Since 1996, there have been 16 multiple victim shootings in schools, or incidents involving four or more victims and at least two deaths by firearms, excluding the assailant. Of these, eight are mass shootings, or incidents involving four or more deaths, excluding the assailant.

In research set to publish later this year, Fox and doctoral student Emma Fridel found that on average, mass murders happen between 20 and 30 times per year, and about one of those incidents on average takes place at a school.

Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said. Far more children are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents.

The authors of the study also note that active shooter drills and other safety precautions, such as installing metal detectors and requiring ID cards for entry, have also proven ineffective in past school shootings. Fridel pointed to a few examples check them out in the full Northeastern article.

Photo by Jenna Fisher/Patch.