Actual probability of being shot in a school shooting and what to do about it.

What is the actual likelihood that a child will be shot in a school shooting? I have not seen any good statistics on this, although I have seen many approximations and attempts to quantify this. I am going to generate a number, and talk about what happens after I generate that number. Fair warning: I have never taken a class on statistics, and am largely self-taught. The good news is that the statistics portion of this article is fairly straightforward and ultimately meaningless.

In 2017, 50.7 million children were enrolled in school in the fall in the US from pre-k to 12th grade. Every day that the enrolled children of the United States attend school equals 50.7 million school days. Most states require that a child attend 180 days of school a year to stay on course to graduate high school in their class. That translates to 9,126,000,000 school days attended in 2017.

Using the statistics from Everytown (which has the broadest definition of school shooting), 2017 had 65 school shootings, most of which resulted in no injuries. According to Wikipedia, 9 of those incidents resulted in injury or death. In 2017, due to school shootings, there were 15 deaths in the United States, and 26 injuries, for a total number of casualties of 41. The probability of any one child being involved in a school shooting in 2017(absent any controls, just raw numbers here) was 65 (number of school shootings in 2017) divided by 9.126 billion, the number of school days attended in…