MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Education Department’

Banning Guns Will Not Make Schools Safe – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on December 18, 2019

National Public Radio investigated and found that the feds had exaggerated school shootings by twentyfold; NPR could confirm only 11 incidents. Cleveland was credited with 37 shooting incidents, when in reality it was simply a report of 37 schools that noted “possession of a knife or a firearm.” In DeKalb County, Georgia, “a toy cap gun fired on a school bus” counted as a school shooting. One school system was listed as a shooting locale for an incident involving a pair of scissors.

According to the Indiana State Teachers Association, sheriffs’ deputies ordered teachers “into a room four at a time, told them to crouch down and then shot them execution-style with pellets in rapid succession,” leaving several of them bloodied and many of them screaming. The union complained, “The teachers were terrified, but were told not to tell anyone what happened

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/banning-guns-will-not-make-schools-safe/

by

School shootings have become the latest pretext for politicians to destroy the Second Amendment. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, declared in a Democratic presidential candidates’ debate, “I was part of the first generation that saw routine school shootings. We have now produced the second school-shooting generation in this country. We dare not allow there to be a third.” Another Democratic presidential candidate, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Cal.), invoked school shootings to justify confiscating millions of firearms across the nation: “It’s not just the violence that they’ve caused; it’s the fear, the immeasurable fear that our children live in because they are still on our streets. I want to get rid of that fear.”

In reality, despite a tidal wave of misleading propaganda, the number of school shootings has fallen sharply over the past 30 years. But anti-gun activists in government and the media have done their best to persuade people otherwise.

Last year, the federal Education Department reported that “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting” in the 2015-16 school year. National Public Radio investigated and found that the feds had exaggerated school shootings by twentyfold; NPR could confirm only 11 incidents. Cleveland was credited with 37 shooting incidents, when in reality it was simply a report of 37 schools that noted “possession of a knife or a firearm.” In DeKalb County, Georgia, “a toy cap gun fired on a school bus” counted as a school shooting. One school system was listed as a shooting locale for an incident involving a pair of scissors. NPR noted,

Most of the school leaders NPR reached had little idea of how shootings got recorded for their schools. For example, the [federal Civil Rights Data Collection] reports 26 shootings within the Ventura Unified School District in Southern California. “I think someone pushed the wrong button,” said Jeff Davis, an assistant superintendent there. The outgoing superintendent, Joe Richards, “has been here for almost 30 years and he doesn’t remember any shooting,” Davis added.

Even the leftist news site Vox noted, “The risk of a child getting killed by someone else at school in 2011, the last year for which there’s final data, was about 1 in 5 million.” Vox again: The rate of “serious violent victimization” among students — rape, sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated assault — was about 1 in 1,000 in 2011, down from 1 in 100 in 1995. In 1995, 10 percent of students were victims of some kind of crime at school; in 2011, just 4 percent were.” Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox observed, “We over-obsess about school shootings. Surveys show the majority of students are afraid there will be a mass shooting at their school. These are rare events — scary though they may be, tragic though they may — and we shouldn’t over-respond.”

Imitation shootings

But hard facts have proven no match for sustained hype for antigun activists. Police and schools have responded to the new paranoia with an array of drills that have been lame-brained even by government standards. Read the rest of this entry »

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The School Shootings That Weren’t

Posted by M. C. on August 30, 2018

The Education Department, asked for comment on our reporting, noted that it relies on school districts to provide accurate information in the survey responses and says it will update some of these data later this fall. But, officials added, the department has no plans to republish the existing publication….

The US department of education is a political organization just like any other.

The main concern is to keep the money flowing in, no matter how down US students fall with respect other countries. Justification for existence is paramount.

Obfuscation and ignorance is rampant judging from the article. Likely both intentional and because this is a typical inefficient/ineffective government organization.

It wasn’t always this way.

The United States was founded, formed and grew to international prominence and prestige without compulsory schooling and with virtually no government involvement in schooling. Before the advent of government-controlled schools, literacy was high (91-97% in the North, 81% in the South), private and community schools proliferated, and people cared about education and acted on their desire to learn and have their children learn.

Walter Williams has amassed a body of work on government schools.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent

LA Johnson/NPR

How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school?

We should know. But we don’t.

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.

But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.

We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports. Read the rest of this entry »

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