Snopes.com explored the popular liberal talking point that (to quote the front of the New York Daily News) “more students or teachers killed by guns in U.S. schools than active-duty military deaths in 2018.” That statistic is true if you only count deaths in combat, and false if you include accidental deaths.
Whoopi Goldberg threw out the point on The View on Monday: "After Friday's high school shooting in Texas, more American students have died from gun violence in 2018 than U.S. soldiers in combat."
Snopes relied in part on a Philip Bump piece at The Washington Post (independent of the "Fact Checker" team) with the headline "2018 has been deadlier for schoolchildren than deployed service members." It had to be corrected. Bump originally reported there were 27 student deaths in school shootings and only 13 casualties reported by the Department of Defense. But then Bump relayed:
Comparing all fatalities in school shootings with all military deaths, the latter is higher, contrary to the original headline of this article. In both cases, those totals have been boosted by mass casualty events. In the case of the military, 20 of the fatalities occurred in just three aircraft crashes. In the case of schoolchildren, most of the deaths were in Santa Fe, Tex., last week and the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. in February.
Bump talked to military fact-trackers who are studying how at present, more members of the military are dying in training than in combat. This would never be used by the "objective" press to explore how much of a "warmonger" the current president is at this point.
But here is the crucial piece of data:
Being a member of the military is still far more dangerous than being a student, of course. There are more than 50 million students in public elementary and high schools and only about 1.3 million members of the armed forces. So far in 2018, a member of the military, deployed or in training, has been more than 50 times as likely to be killed as someone is to die in a school shooting.
That said, 2018 is abnormal. Comparing shootings tallied by The Post with Defense-Department-reported casualties in 2017 — that is to say, non-training deaths — at no point were the number of military fatalities higher than the number of people killed in school shootings.
Finally, The New York Times has just reported (as Fox's Laura Ingraham concluded her show on Wednesday) that school is the safest place for children after a look at homicide data:
While homicide is among the leading causes of death for young people, school is a relative haven compared with the home or the neighborhood. According to the most recent federal data, between 1992 and 2015, less than 3 percent of homicides of children 5 to 18 years old occurred at school, and less than 1 percent of suicides.
We have rated this Snopes.com "fact check" as The Real Deal. For similar analyses, please visit our Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers site.
