By Amy Swearer via The Daily Signal, December 10, 2024
If a recent survey is any indication, significant numbers of American voters are shockingly ill-informed about the reality of gun violence.The survey—conducted by RMG Research Inc. on behalf of the Napolitan News Service—asked registered voters whether they believed that school shootings or gang violence led to more gun deaths every year.
A staggering one-third (35%) of respondents blamed school shootings for more gun deaths, while an additional 11% were unsure which factor bears more responsibility for fatal gun violence.
That’s a problem.
First, it’s clear that gun control groups are leading Americans to both greatly overestimate just how often school shootings occur and underestimate just how safe the nation’s students and teachers are when it comes to gun violence on campus.
Despite the enormous and understandable media attention garnered by shootings on school campuses, those events are far too rare to plausibly constitute a leading cause of gun deaths.
That’s true even when using the intentionally overbroad definitions of “school shooting” that many gun control groups have pushed in recent years to inflate the number of school shooting deaths.
Take, for example, the database of “gunfire on school grounds” compiled by the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, which includes within its parameters any discharge of a firearm that occurred on property owned by any educational organization, at any time of day, and under any set of circumstances.
According to that database, in 2023, 45 people died as a result of a gun being fired on school grounds.
While all 45 of those deaths are tragic in their own right, they amount to less than one-tenth of 1% of the more than 46,000 Americans who, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, died from gunshot injuries that year.
That’s all the more remarkable, given the number of people on a school campus on any given day. Nearly 55 million students attend the nation’s 115,000 private and public K-12 schools, which employ millions more teachers, administrators, and staff members.
Combine that with the 19 million students enrolled in more than 3,500 degree-granting colleges and universities (as well as their 3 million employees), and well over 90 million Americans—more than a quarter of the entire population—spend significant portions of their waking hours on or around property owned by an educational facility.
Moreover, many of these 45 deaths occurred under circumstances that bear shockingly little resemblance to a “school shooting,” as ordinary Americans commonly understand that phrase. Everytown’s death tally includes suicides, unintentional discharges, and legal interventions, as well as numerous cases in which adult suspects fatally shot adult victims during criminal confrontations that just happened to take place on property owned by a school district, college, or university.
Many times, no one involved in the shooting was affiliated with the school, and no one affiliated with the school was ever endangered. A significant number of the fatal shootings happened well outside of classroom hours—overnight, on weekends, or during times when the school otherwise wasn’t in session and no students or staff members were present.
Perhaps no incident included as “gun death on school property” could better exemplify how unmoored these numbers are from any true measure of student safety than the lone death on a K-12 campus in Georgia in 2023.
A man with a history of domestic violence kidnapped his 19-year-old ex-girlfriend at gunpoint from a restaurant. He led police on a high-speed car chase into a neighboring county before officers used a precision immobilization technique (PIT) maneuver to disable his vehicle, which then stalled at the entrance of a middle school parking lot.
The man fatally shot the victim during a subsequent shootout with police.
It was 11 p.m., on a Sunday night in July.
Was this woman’s death tragic and likely preventable? Yes. But it tells us absolutely nothing about the relative risk of gun violence to students and staff during the school day.
And, relevant for purposes of the Napolitan poll in particular, Everytown’s death total also includes at least four gang-related shooting deaths that incidentally occurred at or near a school. Two of those deaths, for example, occurred during a January double homicide outside of an alternative educational program facility in Des Moines, Iowa, that prosecutors say stemmed from “rival gang affiliations.”
Several other fatal shootings that weren’t specifically labeled as “gang-related” nonetheless involved suspects with known gang affiliations or extensive criminal histories.
Second, it’s clear that many Americans still misunderstand just how significant a role gang violence plays in the nation’s overall gun violence problem, especially compared with school shootings.
Major jurisdictions that track homicide motives routinely report that substantial percentages of homicides every year are attributable to gang members and gang violence. In 2023, the city of Los Angeles identified 154 of the year’s 327 homicides as “gang-related” deaths. That same year, the Chicago Police Department reported that of the 411 homicides in the city for which a motive could be discerned, 148 could be categorized as “gang altercations.”
Assuming that three-quarters of these gang-related homicides were, as with all homicides, carried out using firearms (likely an underestimation, given that gang-related violence is more likely to involve firearms compared with other types of violent crime), that would mean that those two cities alone suffered from an estimated 226 gang-related gun deaths in 2023.
That’s roughly five times the number of all gun deaths on school property recorded by Everytown’s database that year for the entire nation.
Nor is 2023 unique in this regard. Between 2019 and 2022, the Chicago Police Department reported 943 criminal homicides for which “gang altercation” was identified as the underlying motive. The real number is almost certainly higher, as at least some percentage of the additional 880 deaths for which no motive could be established were also likely gang-related.
During that same period, Everytown’s database recorded 173 deaths due to gunfire on school grounds across the entire United States.
The fact that so many American voters so drastically misunderstand the nature of gun violence in this country is disheartening. When voters don’t understand the reality of a problem, it’s significantly harder to get them—and policymakers—on board with public policy solutions that actually address the real issues and thereby increase public safety.
It’s why we as a nation routinely bite hook, line, and sinker into blanket calls to “just do something” after any tragedy involving firearms.
If we don’t understand what’s wrong, it’s easy to be persuaded that anything is a “solution.”
Amy Swearer is a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
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