In fact, of the 2,000 killings of children a year, only about 10 occur in or near schools. To enhance child safety, we would do better to control drunken driving on weekends than to turn schools into lock-down facilities with metal detectors. But fewer than one-tenth of these were categorized by the survey as serious. Also included were fistfights, threats and unwanted grabbing or fondling. Certainly adolescents should not fight.
Verbal threats do constitute simple assault.
And while there are no hard data that show bullying on the increase, schools need to devise better ways to address it. Even gun violence is not a significant school problem, despite some highly publicized, horrifying instances. For every teenager killed by a gun in school, more than 300 are killed by guns elsewhere. Teenage violence outside the school setting is a serious problem, greater here than in other industrialized nations. But since 1993, there has been a decline in it and in major categories like murder and rape.