Last week, just days into the new school year, a 23-year-old transgender gunman targeted a Minneapolis Catholic school that he used to attend, opening fire on students through the windows of the church where they’d gathered for a special mass. He killed two students and wounded nearly two dozen additional victims before taking his own life.

Here are three of the most uncomfortable truths about school shootings in the wake of this latest tragedy.

When mass shootings take place on school campuses, we remember them. They are uniquely devastating events that strike deeply at our most basic sense of public safety. And, in their aftermath, they leave a wake of heated and politically charged rhetoric that all but ensures the trauma will be dragged back into the headlines for months or even years after the killing has stopped.

The highly salient nature of school shootings makes it easy to assume that they are responsible for hundreds of deaths every year or that, at the very least, it’s statistically likely that any particular student or teacher will be victimized by a school shooter on any given day. And yet, the actual statistics indicate that the nation’s students and teachers are remarkably safe from gun violence while at school. This is true even when using the broadest possible definition of what constitutes a “school shooting.”

Consider the database maintained by Everytown, a well-known gun control advocacy group, which tracks every time that a person fires a gun on school-owned property, regardless of context. According to that database, between Aug. 1, 2024, and Aug. 1, 2025, only 125 “incidents of gunfire” occurred at any one of the more than 130,000 public and private K-12 schools across the nation. As a result of these “incidents of gunfire,” 34 people died and another 83 sustained injuries.

Even taken at face value, these numbers are extraordinarily........

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