Did you know that school children today are actually more safe than they were 30 years ago?

Did you know that school children today are actually more safe than they were 30 years ago? A study recently conducted by James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, found that school children are actually much more safe today than they were in the 1990s. His study found there have been only nine “mass shootings” on schools since 1996 if you define a “mass shooting” as a massacre with more than four deaths, not including the gunman.

Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s the United States saw a sharp increase in gun and gun violence in the schools, according to a survey conducted by The Harvard School of Public Health. Children today are much more likely to die from bicycle accidents or accidental pool drownings than in a mass shooting at school.

The Education Department reports that roughly 50 million children attend public schools for roughly 180 days per year. Since Columbine, approximately 200 public school students have been shot to death while school was in session, including the recent shootings in Florida and Texas. That means the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was roughly 1 in 614,000,000. And since the 1990s, shootings at schools have been getting less common.

The chance of a child being shot and killed in a public school is extraordinarily low. Not zero — no risk is. But it’s far lower than many people assume based on media coverage. And it’s far lower than almost any other mortality risk a kid faces, including traveling to and from school, catching a potentially deadly disease while in school or suffering a life-threatening injury playing interscholastic sports. The media stokes hysteria for ratings and to sell newspapers and to advance its political agenda to repeal the second amendment and confiscate guns from law-abiding citizens. If children are constantly told that going to school is a death sentence they will believe it. So will their parents.