I can’t help but notice the difference between the way fatalities are treated depending upon whether the children killed are being educated at home or at public school. If seven children were killed by a demented homeschool mother, this would spark a national media outcry and demands for more restrictions on homeschooling.
And yet, in the past four months, we have seen multiple incidences of multiple fatalities due to acts of Man and Nature, but the thought that perhaps it is not wise to congregate large numbers of vulnerable children together never seems to enter the national discourse.
According to Wikipedia, there have been 278 tornado-related deaths at school since 1885. That is nearly 2.2 deaths per year, which is a trivial percentage of the 48 million or so children attending the public schools. And yet, they are entirely avoidable deaths; under the oft-cited “if just one life can be saved” metric, it cannot be denied that children who are not forced to congregate en masse at school cannot be killed by tornadoes there.
Two tornado-inflicted deaths per year isn’t much, but add to them the 26 schoolbus deaths per year, the 600 school-automotive deaths per year, and the 34 violence-related deaths, and it soon becomes readily apparent that school cannot reasonably be considered a safe place for children.
Forget the superior education received by homeschooled children. Doesn’t saving the lives of more than 662 children every year make banning school a moral imperative?
Especially in light of the fact that 119 children under the age of twelve, (and 565 under the age of 18), were killed by guns. School is literally more lethally dangerous than guns; something you might want to remind your average pro-public school, pro-gun control left-liberal.
Guns secure freedom at a lower cost in children’s lives than the public schools manage to deliver inferior educations. We don’t need gun control, we need school control.