Sometimes the best service the media can provide is a simple message.
Stay calm. Things aren’t that bad.
Whenever newspapers and the networks report on a school shooting – much less a mini-spree of them – the temptation is to think that the world is spiraling out of control.
The cable news networks start frothing for ratings. Up go the on-screen graphics – open-ended fear-mongering like “Is your child in danger?”
Self-appointed school-security experts – looking to make a buck as consultants – start e-mailing reporters about the urgent threat to America’s children.
And legislators, eager for five minutes with Nancy Grace, start overreacting and throwing around dumb ideas.
Everybody wins – except for anyone who wants to point out the truth. Which is that violence in schools has plummeted over the past decade.
It may be hard to think about that when your TV shows a line of Amish buggies rolling in a funeral procession – or when the country has three school shootings in a week’s time. But it’s the truth.
By just about every measure, school violence has been falling steadily since the early 1990s. Federal statistics say incidents of serious school violence were twice as common in 1994 as they were in 2004. […]
Read More… from COLUMN: Don’t believe the hype about violence at schools