Double post! But I read something interesting on Slashdot just now (which I linked since the original includes actual links for fact-checking purposes), so I'll paste it verbatim here:
"Do you screen the games your kids play for deer crossing the road [youtube.com]? Would it surprise you to learn that deer are more dangerous than school shootings?
There have been about 250 fatalities from school shootings over 18 years [washingtonpost.com] (excluding suicides and gang violence). That works out to (250)/(18) = 13.9 deaths per year. Since there are approximately 51 million K-12 students in the U.S. [ed.gov], a student's odds of being killed in a school shooting in any given year are (51 million) / (13.9 per year) = 1 in 3.67 million.
About 120 Americans are killed every year by deer [vox.com]. (325.7 million Americans) / (120 per year) = 1 in 2.71 million.
So a student is more likely to be killed by a deer than from a school shooting. Where are all the walk-outs and protests advocating deer population control?
For some perspective on the scope of the school shooting problem, look at the stats the CDC puts out. For 2015, the leading causes of death [cdc.gov] among the 15-19 year old demographic were:
3,919 deaths - Accidents (mostly automobile accidents and drug overdoses). 282x more than school shootings.
2.061 deaths - Suicide. 148x more.
1,587 deaths - Homicide (mostly outside school, and gang related). 114x more.
583 deaths - Malignant neoplasms (cancer). 42x more.
306 deaths - Heart disease. 22x more.
195 deaths - Birth defects. 14x more.
72 deaths - Influenza (the flu). 5.2x more.
63 deaths - Chronic lower respiratory diseases. 4.5x more.
61 deaths - Cerebrovascular diseases. 4.4x more.
52 deaths - Diabetes. 3.7x more.
41 deaths - Complications from pregnancy and childbirth. 3x more.
A protest over excessive rates of teen pregnancy could potentially save 3x more lives than a protest over school shootings. Likewise, teaching kids not to each too many sweets, to exercise, not to smoke, get the flu shot, use sunscreen, not to join gangs, to buckle their seat belt, not to use drugs, and offering them counseling for depression, would all be much more productive uses of our time and effort than worrying about or debating school shootings. For that matter, controlling deer populations to reduce the number of fatalities from striking deer could potentially save 1.35x as many students' lives as lost to school shootings.
If you want to tackle a life-threatening issue that students face, probably the best choice is suicide. It results in more than a hundred times as many student deaths as school shootings. But when's the last time you saw the media run a story about teen suicide? The only reason school shootings are even on the radar is because of the media using them to play the "think of the children!" card against guns."