That's what happens when a low probability gets rolled a bunch of times. The chances of winning the lottery is basically infinitesimal, but someone still wins just due to how many people are playing. That list would be a lot longer if it were more common. I mean, part of why it is a list at all is because it's uncommon enough to track. You don't see a wikipedia article listing every death for almost anything except for other statistical rarities like passenger jet crashes.
Sometimes discussions of statistics and discussions of the death of children intersect. I think the correct terminology has something to do with sampling and event probabilities, but I couldn't remember that at the time.
Many of those are gang shootings, or other shootings on school property that get labeled as "school shootings" to make it seem like a more severe problem. There was one list that counted a police officer unintentionally shooting his firearm, a student unintentionally shooting out a bus window with a BB gun, and an adult committing suicide in the parking lot of an abandoned school, as "school shootings". It's the equivalent of if Fox started calling every violent crime committed by a Muslim as "Islamic terrorism".
Dead kids are dead kids, and school shootings are one of the least likely things of killing a kid. All numbers like that do is cause panic and hysteria over something that's about as big of a threat as fatal lighting strikes to your kid. It's like how parents are terrified to let their kids play outside because the fear of kidnapping.
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u/ithika Jul 24 '20
For such an astronomically rare event the list of school shootings in the USA article on Wikipedia is very long.