Is it normal to be safer as an active-duty soldier than as a kid at school?
A shocking statistic pointing to an unregulated American gun culture has revealed that, to date in 2018, more children in US schools have been killed in shootings than the current total of military service member fatalities.
Friday’s school shooting in Texas created a terrible new statistic; that more Americans have been killed at schools to date in 2018 than have died while on active US military duty over the same time period.
Using statistics compiled from US Defense Department (DoD) statements, the total number of student — excluding even teachers, administrative and maintenance personnel — shooting deaths in schools exceeds all US military casualties in 2018 to date, according to a deep data dive by the Washington Post.
In comparison, in 2017 US service member fatalities were much higher than the number children killed in school shootings.
Experts and lawmakers in the US are at a loss to assert whether the stunning statistic is an anomaly, or whether it represents a new normal for American life, and are equally helpless as to facing the problem and fixing it.
The 2018 statistic — while alarming — is, according to a cautionary Washington Post, not intended to imply that US schools are necessarily more dangerous than global combat zones.
When expressing the data as cold statistics, it is noted that there are over 50 million students in US public school systems and only an estimated 1.3 million members of US armed forces.
To look at the killings of children in US schools and the deaths of US military service members as merely numbers on a graph sheet, in 2018, a US soldier is about 40 times as likely to die as a student in a shooting at school.
But setting aside mere statistical analysis, 2018 is unusually deadly in US schools, as some three times the number of killings have occured compared to the previous year.
According to the Washington Post, there have been, to date, 29 deaths in 16 shooting incidents in 2018 in US schools.
Over the same period there have been 13 US service member deaths in seven incidents around the world, including helicopter crashes.
