Every week, there's an op-ed somewhere in the country that crosses my news feed where someone goes on about how their child is terrified that they'll get shot at school. Mass killings make headlines and dominate the news cycle. When coupled with parents who feed on that hysteria, it's no wonder some of these kids are so traumatized.
But the truth is that your kids are more likely to have to worry about a teacher than the quiet kid in the back of the classroom.
Today is the first anniversary of the FSU shooting, and some are using it to talk about how Florida should have passed gun control, as it did after Parkland. Never mind that the Parkland measures didn't stop the FSU shooting from happening, but they still want gun control.
And the hysteria about kids and parents worried their child won't be there at the end of the school day is just more emotional blackmail designed to feed that desire.
However, a 2025 study found that between 2020 and 2024, when there was an increase in school shootings, 51 students out of 100,000 were exposed to a school shooting. "Exposed" is defined as simply attending a school where a shooting happened, which means many heard nothing more than gunshots and had to deal with a lockdown.
That works out to 0.051 percent of students attending school that year were "exposed" to such an incident. For those who were exposed to one, I'm sure it was terrifying, to say the least, but it's ridiculously rare. A high school athlete has about 10 times the chance of getting a Division I college scholarship than the average student has of experiencing a school shooting in any way at all.
But a 2023 report found that 11.7 percent of recent graduates report some incident of sexual misconduct by a teacher. These can be verbal comments, which are the most common, but they're still horrifically inappropriate.
While sexual harassment from educators isn't the same as kids being gunned down – and I'm not trying to remotely imply that it is – the reality is that more kids are traumatized in their educational lives not by the sounds of gunfire, but by the math teacher dropping his pencil so he can ask the cheerleader to pick it up for him so he can get a view of her butt.
And what's sad is that this isn't all hidden from view. Not a week goes by, it seems, that we don't have a story of a teacher having an inappropriate relationship with an underage student. How often do we have a mass shooting at a school? Yeah, one is too many, but isn't that also true of teachers taking advantage of our kids and their immaturity for their own predatory desires?
While the anti-gun activists like to try and play with emotions, acting like their child's fear is simply the natural outcome of something that's happening around them and not an artifact of the 24-hour news cycle trying to make a point and their own rhetoric scarring their child's psyche, the real threat is in the building with them every day, paid with taxpayer money, routinely shipped off to another school instead of fired for their behavior, and then celebrated as heroes.
There are great teachers out there, to be sure. There are also monsters in the classroom, and there are a lot more of them than the quiet kids in the back who are plotting to murder people. By orders of magnitude.
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