It looks like 348 according to that data, resulting in 150 deaths over about 13 years, or 11.5 deaths per year on average.
There are ~74 million people 0-18 years of age in the U.S. right now, meaning about 0.016 deaths per 100,000 children per year.
And these won't be similar across the age spectrum: most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids (either the shooter or the victims), some don't involve any intent to shoot anyone (firing a gun in the air), some involve justified shootings (i.e., in self-defense), and the wikipedia data includes universities so they would fall outside of 0-18. The basic point being the 0.016 number is inflated.
For comparison, drowning is about 1.0 per 100,000 or 64x as likely. Being struck and killed by lightning is about half as likely.
>most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids...
The fact that you have enough school shootings, happening over a long enough period, to allow people to formulate stats about what "most" of them involve is in itself an indictment of why your attitude to gun control is so incomprehensible to so many of us outside the US
In almost every other "Western" country, one solitary school shooting... ever... would be a catastrophe etched into the national consciousness. And would almost certainly have resulted in laws being changed to ensure it could never happen again.
I think you're right about it being a bigger deal elsewhere, and you're right about legislative reactions. I have several thoughts:
1) The U.S. population is really big. 333M or so. New Zealand is 5M? So, inflate the base rate by 66x. When doing "intuitive statistics" about this sort of thing, people think at the country level and don't adjust for population. That will remove some of the effect, but even doing that there's going to be more school shootings in the U.S. per capita, of course.
2) Gun laws don't work. The best available work on this suggests a modest decrease in murder rates at best. People who want to murder will just use alternative means. There are plenty of ways to kill schoolchildren if someone decides to do it. Easy availability of guns probably does increase the rate and deadliness, but not by all that much. Something else is going on in the U.S. Media contagion is part of it, imho.
3) The extent to which people pay attention to astronomically unlikely things like school shootings really doesn't make any sense. As I estimate somewhere else in these comments, the likelihood of a child in the U.S. being shot and killed at school is about double that of being struck and killed by lightning. Though it's a tragic spectacle when it happens, it's not something worth worrying about. The irony is nobody gives a shit about stuff that might actually kill your kids, like drowning, car crashes, etc. People are so, so very nonchalant about things that are actually risky...
I am sorry to say it, but Scientific American has become politicized trash under current leadership. It pains me because I remember it fondly from my childhood. The article you linked to doesn't even try to meet basic scientific standards.
TL;DR: evidence coming from academia (which is extremely anti-gun) only weakly supports a very small subset of gun laws as working. Taken in the light of publication bias and the file drawer problem, this is a nothing.
Thanks for the link. That does seem to be a more thorough analysis than the one in Scientific American, although the latter was good at linking through to the actual studies, so you didn't have to trust the writer or editor of the article.
The RAND analysis doesn't appear to be as equivocal as you suggest though. It says that there are 3 types of laws which have the strongest level of scientific support for their success, but other laws have weaker support, which doesn't mean they aren't effective. Let me highlight two quotes:
"Importantly, however, where we conclude that evidence for a policy is weak, that does not mean that the policy is ineffective; the policy itself might well be quite effective."
"Still, even relatively small effects of gun policies are important to the people and communities affected."
So while it's possible that there are a lot of ineffective laws being proposed, that's far from being evidence that no laws are effective, and it might even be evidence that the problem lies with the Constitution itself (which is another type of law which could be changed).
I wonder, though, what it would take for me to convince you of anything, since you could just dismiss all scientific research as "coming from academia" and therefore tainted by political views that you don't like. Perhaps if the gun lobby commissioned their own researchers to produce a report, you would find that sufficiently neutral, but I won't go looking for such a report.
One area where we might agree, though, is in disapproving of immature ad hominem arguments, so perhaps we just need to make sure that we're both extending that disapproval to mature ad hominem arguments as well. ;-)
There are ~74 million people 0-18 years of age in the U.S. right now, meaning about 0.016 deaths per 100,000 children per year.
And these won't be similar across the age spectrum: most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids (either the shooter or the victims), some don't involve any intent to shoot anyone (firing a gun in the air), some involve justified shootings (i.e., in self-defense), and the wikipedia data includes universities so they would fall outside of 0-18. The basic point being the 0.016 number is inflated.
For comparison, drowning is about 1.0 per 100,000 or 64x as likely. Being struck and killed by lightning is about half as likely.