Are School Homicides ‘Becoming the Norm’?

In the aftermath of yesterday’s
shooting at an Oregon high school, the president worried that such
slayings are “becoming
the norm.” I’ve written skeptically in the past about whether
the number of mass shootings in America is actually increasing, as
the word becoming implies—see my posts here,

here, and
here—but there’s always a haze of uncertainty around those
numbers, thanks to the
varying definitions of “mass shooting” that different people
use.

But maybe that isn’t the best thing to be measuring in the first
place. The Oregon incident isn’t a “mass” shooting at all—the
gunman killed two people, and one of those was himself—but it
obviously speaks to the same sorts of fear and grief. If your son
was just shot, after all, it’s hardly a comfort that his classmates
survived. A
map darting around the Internet this week claims to show all
the school shootings since Sandy Hook. Note the modifier:
school, not mass.

So how frequently are people killed at school? The Bureau of
Justice Statistics (BJS) keeps a running count of such homicides,
with “at school” defined to include deaths not just on school
property but “while the victim was on the way to or from regular
sessions at school or while the victim was attending or traveling
to or from an official school-sponsored event.” You might quibble
about whether those off-campus killings belong in this category,
but still, it’s a straightforward definition that doesn’t get
bogged down in how many people die in one attack or, for that
matter, what weapon was used to murder them.

As it happens, the bureau published a new report on school
violence this month. Here is the relevant chart:

With the caveat that with numbers this low it’s easy to be
misled by random
noise, I’ll point out that the figure has fallen. Note also
that these are raw totals, not deaths per population. A chart of
school homicide rates would show an even steeper
decline.*

But has that decline come to an end? As you can see, the
bureau’s figures only go through the 2010–11 school year, thus
excluding the Sandy Hook massacre and everything since. Twenty
children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook, making the
event bloody enough to cause a spike in 2012–13 all by itself. We
don’t have enough data to say for certain whether that year was an
outlier like 2006–07 or the start of a new trend, but the authors
do offer some tentative numbers for the period since the massacre.
According to “preliminary counts from media reports,” they write,
the U.S. saw “17 school-associated violent deaths between December
15, 2012, and November 14, 2013″—11 homicides and six suicides,
with six of the dead being of student age.

Those numbers might sound surprisingly low if you’ve seen the
aforementioned map
of school shootings since Sandy Hook, which draws on data from the
gun-control group Everytown. In part that’s because its count stops
this month instead of last November, but it’s also because it
includes colleges. (Of the 74 incidents
listed by Everytown, 35 occured on or near a college
campus.**) The map also includes nonfatal shootings, including
accidental discharges and at least four events in which no one was
injured at all. And some of its items qualify as “school shootings”
only under a rather broad understanding of the phrase. While
this killing,
for example, did take place in an elementary school parking lot, it
happened at night, long after the students and teachers had gone
home. The victim was 19.

This much is clear: If you’re wondering where kids are likely to
die, the answer plainly isn’t a classroom. (Quoting the BJS report
one more time: “During the 2010–11 school year, 11 of the 1,336
homicides among school-age youth ages 5–18 occurred at school.”)
And in the period for which we have clear data, the school homicide
rate moved in the same direction as the overall homicide
rate: downward. To bring it still lower, the first question to ask
is what happened to get us that far.

(* The researchers are still interviewing officials about
some of these incidents, so there’s a chance that some will be
reclassified in future reports.)

(** The BJS report includes a separate discussion of
college-level crime. “Fifteen murders occurred on college campuses
in 2011, the same number as in 2010,” it notes. The authors don’t
go into detail about homicides in earlier years, but they do say
the “number of on-campus crimes reported in 2011 was lower than in
2001 for every category, except for forcible sex
offenses.”)