March 1, 2018 There Are Fewer School Shootings Now Than During the 1990s
Usually, the sentiment behind this idea is that there are more murders now than there used to be. Now, I'm not exactly known for being a Pollyanna, but I am willing to admit when things are not, in fact, getting worse. And when it comes to things like homicides, there is no evidence that things are getting worse. It is indeed true that things aren't like they were "when we were kids," but that's a good thing. There were far more homicides in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s than there are today. Things were even worse than that during the 1970s. In fact, the homicide rate in the US was cut in half between 1991 and 2014. And while the homicide rate has inched up over the past two years, it is nowhere near where it was "when we were kids."  For anyone familiar with these trends, it should not be a shock to hear that a subset of those homicides — school shootings — have decreased over that period as well. In response to the latest shooting in Florida, Northeastern University released a preview of new research by James Alan Fox slated for publication this fall which shows, quite clearly, that there is no growing trend in school shootings. The university notes:
In a February 22 article, New York Magazine came to a similar conclusion, noting:
New York was drawing on research from the US Justice Department showing that "school victimization" rates have plummeted since 1992, as a graph provided by the Justice Department shows:  Fox, the author of the Northeastern University research, does not oppose policy changes like increasing the age for purchasing guns. But he notes it's unlikely to impact the numbers very much:
Ironically, those most familiar with the data on shootings are often less likely to assume that gun control measures are an easy solution to the problem of homicide. For example, last year, Leah Libresco at the Washington Post — hardly an organ of the NRA — concluded that gun control measures are of extremely limited value:
What Libresco did conclude, was that a host of societal issues are driving much of what we hear about in terms of so-called gun violence. Mental illness, suicide, gang violence, and domestic violence are all important factors that drive gun violence. The problem, Libresco admits, is that simply prohibiting certain types of guns doesn't really address these issues. Accepting the "Crisis" NarrativeIn the wake of last month's Florida shooting, many opponents of gun control made the mistake of simply accepting the claim that school shootings are getting worse, and are more deadly overall. According to Fox's research, though, this is simply not the case. And we also certainly know that homicides overall are way down from where they were in the good ol' days of my youth. These apparent facts, of course, don't stop even rightwing professional Cassandras like Rod Dreher from authoring articles like this one called "Underestimating American Collapse" which uses school shootings as evidence that American civilization is basically on the brink of collapse:
Maybe American society is in a more perilous position that in the 1980s. But if we're looking for evidence of that, the homicide data won't help the argument. Dreher is right to question why American kids are killing each other. But an equally relevant question might also be "why are fewer American kids killing each other now than 25 years ago?" School Shootings and Opportunity CostPart of the problem with accepting the crisis narrative is that it ignores other priorities and other problems that may deserve our attention elsewhere. After all, resources for schools — or anything else — are not unlimited, and it is unclear that extremely rare events like school shootings can be put forward as a priority. This problem of priorities can be seen in the fact that cities where snow falls irregularly do not maintain a huge fleet of snowplows. In Naples, Italy last week, for example, the city experienced the largest snowfall it's seen in 50 years. According to the Daily Mail, the snowfall was seen as a citywide emergency and "[r]esidents have been told not to leave their homes unless it is 'strictly necessary.'" One man was said to have even frozen to death in the unexpectedly frigid temperatures. Now, if even a few inches of snow can bring the city to a standstill and endanger the lives of residents, why does the city not have far more snow plows than it does? Why is there not a network of emergency workers to ensure that residents are not caught in the cold where they can be injured or even killed by cold temperatures? The answer, of course, is that the opportunity cost of such measures would be extremely high. By maintaining personnel and equipment designed to address a rare snowfall, the city would be foregoing the opportunity to train people or purchase equipment for a wide variety of other activities that are no doubt also deemed essential. While school shootings no doubt have a greater psychological impact than frigid temperatures, it is no less true that spending large amounts of resources on anti-shooting measures carry with them their own costs. Now, in the US, many organizations, both public and private have elected to devote sizable amounts of resources to security. But none of them deny that there is an opportunity cost to doing so. Indeed, opponents of added security in schools have been quick to point out the costs of more security measures. And yet, proponents of more gun control act as if there are no opportunity costs to these measures. In reality, of course, the costs of enforcing government prohibitions can be very high, both in terms of tax dollars and costs imposed upon otherwise law abiding citizens. The drug war has made this quite clear. In the absence of individual gun ownership, professional security will become more necessary, and in many cases more costly. This imposes a real cost on citizens, especially on those who cannot afford professional security. Relying on the police for protection, of course, has been shown to be unwise at best. What Are We Doing Right?Many observers will still point out that even a small number of school shootings is too many. That's true enough, but when the multi-decade trend is downward, it would hardly be honest to attempt to frame the current situation as a "crisis." Indeed the challenge should be to discover what factors have led to the decline in violence, and act accordingly. Given that gun ownership has greatly increased in recent decades, it may be that the answer lies somewhere beyond a simply government prohibition on guns. Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Send him your article submissions, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre. Back To It Takes Brains
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Now that I have several children, I'm often in the company of other parents who talk about the way things "used to be." When the issue of child safety comes up, I hear parents sadly shake their heads and say things like "it's not like it was when we were kids … the world is so much more dangerous now."