I take look at guns and schools in The 74. Most people would agree we have a gun violence problem in this country, but the schools are actually pretty safe and we shouldn’t lose sight of that and turn our schools into fortresses or scare the kids in them:
Our debate about guns in schools, by contrast, seems increasingly fueled by panic rather than measured thinking and may have unintended consequences as a result. This week, again and again, we heard that 7,000 kids have been killed in school since Sandy Hook. That’s a staggering statistic — and major publications echoed it. It’s also a false one. That figure is an estimate of overall youth homicide by firearms — a horrific number that policymakers ought to do something about — but not a school statistic…
