[chalupa-man]

Your source doesn't say school shootings are down from previous highs nor that they're very rare; it specifically only deals with shootings where _4 or more students were killed_ excluding the shooter. That's a very different things from "school shootings", where the mean number of fatalities is 3. If you define "school shooting" as "people being shot at school", then use the same data as in your source, you see 247 people shot in 64 incidents during the 2000s, and 555 people shot in 213 incidents during the 2010s. (It's worth noting that Fridel & Fox came under some scrutiny for choosing their definition of school shooting, because the standard definition used--by the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and by Fox himself in previous studies that conflicted with his new one--is four people _shot_. )

What we're seeing is a large increasing in the number of school shootings, but a decrease in the average success of each school shooter. Is it surprising that the average shooter has become less effective when schools are spending a lot of time and money preparing to deal with them? Shooter drills, established lockdown procedures, buildings being designed with escape and hiding in mind[0], staff training, employment of security guards, etc.

The data you're citing states it plainly: there are more shootings at schools now than 10 or 20 years ago, and more people are being shot at school than 10 or 20 years ago. 50 people killing 3 kids each isn't somehow safer than 25 people killing 4 kids each.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/08/22/new-high...

[Dylan16807]

Hang on. If you're counting things where only one or two people are shot, there is very often no intent to shoot more than that. You can't use that data point by itself to talk about the "success" of school shooters. And those smaller incidents are definitely not what I think of when I hear the words "school shooting".

> 50 people killing 3 kids each isn't somehow safer than 25 people killing 4 kids each.

But you have to treat people killing 2 kids in a completely different way from people that are killing 20. Drills, lockdown procedures, almost all gun limitations... those don't do anything against a single murder.