And remember, the US a has a large population - 60 times more people live here than in, say, Norway. So for a given incidence rate per capita, you would expect the US to have more. If you use per capita figures instead, in the past twenty years, more people have been killed by mass shootings (5 or more strangers), in Norway than in the US. (I totally cherry picked Norway, bad me! Though I could have also used France, which also had more per capita deaths from mass shootings than the US in the last five years.)
Now it's still an absolute tragedy, but on the list of things to worry about, your child being killed in a mass elementary school shooting in the US is about an order of magnitude less likely that you being struck and killed by lighting.
Japan has a large population too, about 120M. But the US has 19 times the murder rate of Japan.
I'm sorry, I don't buy the "large population" canard. Lots of European countries have large populations too: UK, Germany, France, Italy all have ~60-80M each. The US is not an order of magnitude greater than these. China has far more people than the US, yet it only has a murder rate of 0.62, compared to the US's 5.35. Japan's is 0.28. The US has a murder rate that compares with those in Sudan and Zimbabwe. But hey, at least we're not as bad as Brazil or El Salvador... /s
The only place where per-capita comparisons really break down are for very tiny countries (micronations). When the population is only a few thousand, you can't get good statistical data from that as the sample size is too small, plus micronations just don't compare to real nations for many reasons. But that's not the issue here because we're comparing nations that all have populations well into the tens of millions or more.
~130,000 K-12 schools in the US, public and private[0]
94 "gun violence" incidents in schools in 2018[1]. This is "each and every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week" - so far more broad than mass shootings alone.
Let's say each incident happened at a different school: that's a 0.072% chance that something happens with a gun at your school in a year. If those numbers are the same each year (and that hasn't been the case; 2018 is higher than normal), it's a ~1% chance that something happens at your school over 13 years of schooling. Without doing a ton of research, I'm sure the odds would be much more or less depending on the school you pick.
Is that enough for you to keep your kid out of school? That's for you to decide. But bringing it back to my point - evaluating the risk isn't as simple as giving a body count, making "dangerous" a subjective term.
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2018/12/10/18134232/gun-violence-schools...
Compare this to other countries like Germany or Japan. What are the chances that your schoolkid is going to experience any kind of violence on that level in schools there? Virtually zero.
Take a look at the murder rate for the US and compare to Japan's. For the US, it was 17,250 murders in 2016, a rate of 5.35 (per 100k people). In Germany, they had 963 murders in 2016, a rate of 1.18. In Japan, they had 362 murders in 2016, a rate of 0.28. The US had 4.5 times Germany's murder rate, and over 19 times Japan's!
I'd say it's outright lunacy to think that the US isn't a very dangerous country to live in. Just check out the rankings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
The US is ranking alongside such nations as Sudan, Ecuador, Argentina, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Kenya. Even North Korea has a lower murder rate; Turkey, India, Rwanda, Egypt, and Iran have significantly lower murder rates than the US. China is downright safe with a murder rate of only 0.62! (Of course, the pollution will probably kill you early there...)
I think the statistics clearly show the US is not a very safe place to live: murder rate, mass shooting rates, gun violence rates, etc. are all extremely high in the US compared to developed nations. And it's likely to get worse, as our elections have shown.
Do you live in the US? I do, and I've never felt unsafe in any of the places I've lived in. Maybe I'm 4-5x more likely to be murdered here compared to Germany, but a 0.00535% chance of getting murdered this year doesn't really move the needle for me. I also know that there are wide variances in that rate based on the community I live in, the people I associate with, and the activities in which I partake.
If you think you'd feel safer in North Korea because the murder rate is lower, feel free to live there instead! I'll take my chances here.
In fact, I don't think any of the mass shootings in American schools have been in poor schools at all. Of course, they have their own problems with violence stemming from gang activity and poverty, but the mass shootings are in schools with pretty well-off students.
Mass violence against students is hardly a phenomenon that's exclusive to the US.
See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-kinderga... for a recent example.
If you somehow think a nutcase with a knife can do as much damage as a nutcase with an assault rifle, I don't know how to help you.
I would argue that mass shootings in the US are a very good reason not to raise any kids here or send them to school here, considering many of those shootings were in schools, and many schoolchildren (or college students) have died in those shootings. In fact, I'd say students are the one group that should be most worried about mass shootings, just judging by evidence.