What Fear Hides about School Safety

A new Gallup survey finds that 41% of U.S. K-12 parents fear for their child’s physical safety at school—the fourth straight year anxiety has hovered around the 40% mark. Gallup notes that concern has remained elevated since 2022 and is strongly shaped by highly publicized school shootings [1].

How Likely Is a Student to Be Shot at School?

Let’s anchor fear to math:

• In the 2021–22 school year, federal education statistics (NCES) counted 188 school shootings with casualties (injuries and/or deaths)—the most since tracking began. A separate federal indicator tallied 52 casualties from “active-shooter” incidents in 2022 (a narrower category) [2].
• Taking a broader cut, NCES-based tallies compiled by USAFacts report 350 total casualties (81 deaths, 269 injuries) from K-12 school shootings in 2021–22. With about 49.4 million public K-12 students that year, that’s roughly 0.71 casualties per 100,000 students per year—about 1 in 140,000 per student-year. (This overstates individual risk because not all casualties were students.) Including private-school enrollments (~54M total K-12), the risk drops to about 1 in 155,000 [3].
• For fatal risk: in 2020–21, there were 11 student homicides and 6 student suicides that occurred at or during school (ages 5–18). Even if one (incorrectly) assumed all 11 homicides were firearm-related, the student homicide-at-school death rate would fall near 0.02–0.03 per 100,000 students—on the order of 1 in 4–5 million per student-year [4].

None of this minimizes tragedy. It simply puts base rates next to headline intensity. The public’s fear is understandable—but the per-student probability of being shot at school in a given year remains very low, even in years with unusually high incident counts [2–4].

The Bigger Picture: What Actually Kills American Kids

If we zoom out beyond school buildings, the risk landscape for children and teens looks very different. The latest federal summary of leading causes of death (2021) shows, for ages 5–24, the top four causes and rates per 100,000 are [5]:

1. Unintentional injury – 20.1
2. Suicide – 8.2
3. Homicide – 8.1
4. Cancer – 2.5

These are nationwide, all-location risks—not limited to schools.

Two implications follow:

• Violence outside school settings (homicide and suicide combined) far exceeds the tiny at-school fatality risk.
• Unintentional injuries (car crashes, drowning, poisoning, etc.) remain the dominant danger for youth—an order of magnitude larger than at-school shooting risk [5].

Why Parental Intuition About School Safety Goes Sideways

Humans are bad at assessing risk when stories are vivid but probabilities are tiny. Saturation coverage of school shootings, live feeds, and push alerts amplify availability bias—making rare events feel common. That helps explain why parental fear sits at 41% even while the individual risk to a given student in a given year is roughly 1 in 140,000–155,000 for being shot, and far lower for being killed, at school [1–3].

What is Critical Thinking?

A widely cited expert consensus (the APA Delphi Report) defines critical thinking as “purposeful, self-regulatory judgment” involving interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, and explanation—plus the disposition to apply those skills fairly. Translation: it’s a habit of slow, evidence-based reasoning that checks itself, grounded in logic rather than emotion [6].

A Parent’s Field Guide to Critical Thinking

1. Start with base rates. Before reacting to a scary story, ask, “How often does this happen per 100,000?” [5].
2. Lateral read. Open new tabs and check who’s saying what—a best practice from Stanford’s Civic Online Reasoning research. Don’t tunnel on one link; triangulate across sources [7].
3. Interrogate claims with evidence. What is the dataset? What’s the time window? Are we looking at all casualties or just active-shooter incidents? [2–4]
4. Beware denominator neglect. “X incidents” sounds huge until you divide by tens of millions of students [3].
5. Separate risk reduction from theater. Ask which interventions measurably reduce top causes (seatbelts, safe storage of meds and firearms, swimming lessons) versus symbolic steps that mostly calm nerves. Use the cause-of-death table as your compass [5].

Why Parents Must Teach Critical Thinking at Home

Even when schools do a good job, parents remain the front-line teachers of how to weigh evidence, spot spin, and resist moral panics. The Stanford group that pioneered “lateral reading” found students struggle to evaluate online claims, which means modeling these habits at the dinner table matters: compare sources, read past headlines, and ask, “What would change my mind?” [7].

Do Schools and Colleges Teach Critical Thinking?

On paper, yes. K-12 standards explicitly prioritize critical thinking (e.g., Common Core ELA stresses reasoning with evidence). Employers tell universities they prize it [8].

In practice, it’s messier. Multiple nationwide surveys show high levels of student self-censorship and widespread discomfort speaking freely—conditions that quietly discourage genuine critical inquiry:

• The Knight Foundation–Ipsos 2024 study reports about two-thirds of college students say self-censorship often or sometimes limits valuable conversations; 69% report self-censoring on at least one common topic [9].
• Heterodox Academy’s 2023 Campus Expression Survey likewise finds broad reluctance to discuss controversial ideas [10].
• FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings document substantial self-censorship and, in a separate analysis, more than 1,000 instances since 2020 where students or groups were investigated or punished for protected speech [11].

So yes, schools say they value critical thinking (and many educators really do). But any environment that rewards conformity or punishes good-faith disagreement will suppress the very habits critical thinking requires.

What Happens When Critical Thinking Is Missing?

When people lack the habit—or the space—to check base rates, triangulate sources, and test claims, three bad outcomes follow:

1. Policy by anecdote. A viral clip or single horror story drives resource-intensive, low-yield responses, while the highest-probability threats to kids (unintentional injuries, suicide, homicide) remain under-addressed [5].
2. Manipulability. Media narratives, political talking points, and even ideological classroom cues can steer beliefs precisely because they’re emotionally compelling—not because they’re well-supported. (The Gallup trend line on parental fear versus the tiny at-school base rate is the textbook example) [1–3].
3. Self-censorship feedback loops. If students (or teachers) fear reputational or disciplinary costs for honest disagreement, they stop asking the questions that surface weak assumptions—exactly the questions that make communities smarter and safer [9–11].

A Parent’s Playbook for Raising Critical Thinkers

• Teach the habit, not the headline. When a scary story breaks, walk your child through lateral reading and base-rate checks together [7].
• Invest where probabilities live. Seatbelts and driving practice. Swimming lessons and water supervision. Safe storage of medications and firearms. Social-media boundaries and sleep. Those moves align with the actual top risks [5].
• Model open inquiry. At home, reward good questions and honest disagreement. In school settings, advocate for viewpoint-diverse curricula and processes that protect debate over dogma. Research is clear: students learn more when they can safely challenge ideas [9–11].

Bottom Line on School Safety and Fear

Fear is real—and understandable. But good judgment starts with numbers, not notifications. The data show that the annual risk of a given student being shot at school is extremely low, while other dangers loom much larger. If we want safer kids and saner politics, we need to practice and teach critical thinking—and insist that our media, politicians, and educators make room for it [1–11].

References

1. Gallup. 41% of U.S. Parents Fear for Child’s Safety at School (2025).
2. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Indicators of School Crime and Safety: Violent Deaths and School Shootings (2022).
3. USAFacts. K-12 school shootings data (2021–22 casualties), compiled from NCES.
4. NCES. School-associated violent deaths, 2020–21 (ages 5–18).
5. CDC / AHRQ. Health, United States, 2023: Leading Causes of Death, Ages 5–24, 2021.
6. APA Delphi Report. Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction (1990).
7. Stanford History Education Group. Civic Online Reasoning: Lateral Reading Studies (2016–2022).
8. Common Core State Standards (ELA) and higher education mission statements on critical thinking.
9. Knight Foundation & Ipsos. College Student Views on Free Expression and Campus Speech (2024).
10. Heterodox Academy. Campus Expression Survey (2023).
11. FIRE. College Free Speech Rankings and Case Tracker (2020–2024).

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Dave Chamberlin served 38 years in the USAF and Air National Guard as an aircraft crew chief, where he retired as a CMSgt. He has held a wide variety of technical, instructor, consultant, and leadership positions in his more than 40 years of civilian and military aviation experience. Dave holds an FAA Airframe and Powerplant license from the FAA, as well as a Master’s degree in Aeronautical Science. He currently runs his own consulting and training company and has written for numerous trade publications.

His true passion is exploring and writing about issues facing the military, and in particular, aircraft maintenance personnel.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.