In the last 53 years, there have been 2,057 shooting fatalities in K-12 schools in the US [0]. That's an average of 38 per year. As of 2020, there were 56,282,248 K-12 enrolled students [1]. So there's a .000067% chance that any given one of those students will be shot and killed in any given year.
That's what you're worried about? A .000067% chance? You must live a life of crippling fear then, the number of things more deadly to your kids than .000067% is staggering. I assume you never let them enter a vehicle of any kind, for example.
By the way, of that 38 per year number, less than 10% happens inside a classroom [0]. The most likely location is outside in the school parking lot, a violent dispute between students, and not a "mass shooting" scenario. So if you were mostly concerned about "mass shootings", the odds of death are over 10 times less than .000067%.
This is a sadly all too-common approach to analysing risk and reflecting back the "absurdity" of people's fears (and TBH, I used to do it myself).
Psychological experience of risk (fear) has a large component related to the degree to which a person has control over their exposure, combined with the worst possible (rather than typical) outcome.
So for example, statistically speaking very few black Americans will ever be assaulted by the police but no black American can feel remotely in control of whether or not this may happen to them. And the outcome may include death as a possibility.
Statistically speaking, very few women will be assaulted walking down the street (even at night) but essentially no women can feel that they have any control over whether this happens or not. And the outcome may include death as a possibility.
And so it is with school shootings: yes, statistically speaking it is a vanishingly small chance. But neither parents nor students (nor teachers) have any level of control over whether such an incident will take place in their school, and the worst case scenario is death.
When people feel they lack the agency to control whether or not a bad outcome is more or less likely in their lives, the actual statistics of the outcome tend to fade into dramatically lower significance.
