I can't edit my post as it's been too long, but I do want to say 4.38 deaths a year is still too many for those who lost friends or family members. Any shooting like this is tragic, but it's also important to acknowledge the absurdly small chance of being in a mass school shooting. Many kids are getting extremely worried about something that is nearly a statistical impossibility.
But why are we just looking at mass school shootings? Or school shootings? What about shootings in general?
Why wouldn't homicides of any kind count? People still lose friends or family members, whether they are students in school or otherwise. What about those injured, or seriously wounded?
Here's an article that I feel puts things in perspective.
For example, according to
Politifact, between 1968 and 2011 there were 1.4 million firearm-related deaths, which is 200,000 more casualties than every single American conflict from the War of Independence to the Iraq War.
11,385 people have died on average annually in firearm incidents in the US between 2001 and 2011, according to the
US Department of Justice and the
Council on Foreign Affairs.
In fact, between 2001 and 2011, far more people have died on average each year due to firearms than all terrorist attacks on US soil: in this period, over 113,850 have died from firearm-related incidents against 5,170 deaths due to terrorist attacks, including 9-11 (without taking 9-11 into account, the number of casualties would be 310).
According to
an academic research paper available through the National Center for Biotechnology Information, among non-lethal firearm injuries, 48,534 were wounded through intentional assault, and 11,529 were unintentional.
These statistics do not include suicide rates or self-harm.
Now about your other premise, I feel we need to be clear that there is a difference between texting-while-driving and distracted driving. They are not one and the same.
Distracted driving could be due to more than just texting-while-driving; the
CDC lists various reasons, including eating, using a GPS, or even just daydreaming as causes attributable to distracted driving.
According to the
NHTSA, In 2015, there were a total of 32,166 fatal crashes in the United States involving 48,613 drivers. As a result of those fatal crashes, 35,092 people were killed. Roughly 10% of that number is due to distracted driving.
As for incidents directly attributed to cell-phone distraction, during this same period, there were 442 crashes which resulted in 476 fatalities.