As much of a gun related issue, I would say it is equally, if not more of, a mental health issue. I feel like this is often lost in the discussion.
I agree; access to guns is part of the problem, but so is mental health, which is driven home by the fact that 2 of the 11 incidents appear to be suicides. (and honestly eduction and employment outlooks).
3 homicides among over 50 million students in the United states. That's 0.000006%. Again, it's awful, but let's keep in mind the actual magnitude of this problem
Let's do some fuzzy maths.
50 million students divided by 1000 (average school size) makes 50,000 schools.
11 firearms incidents at schools per month makes 132 incidents per year.
Your children will likely spend 17 years at school.
50,000 / 132 / 17 = 22.28
That's right, your child has a one in twenty two chance of being at a school during a firearms incident.
Those numbers are way off, so let us un-fuzz the math
The average size of a public school was 546.4 and there were 88,182 public schools (for the 2009-2010 year)
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/pesschools09/tables/table_05.aspCAPE says there are another 33,619 private schools.
But those are only for k-12, some of the incidents took place at colleges and universities; let's use the total degree granting post secondary intuitions for this number as 6,742 for the 2009-2010 year.
So now the math looks like
(88,182 + 33,619+ 6,742) / (11*12) / 17
128,543 / 132 / 17 = 57.28...
Now if we use January as a base for the year and say firearm incidents a student would be at risk, then we should take January 4th parking lot suicide out of the equation (also the school was empty at the time) and the January 10th student suicide out of the equation. The math becomes
(88,182 + 33,619+ 6,742) / (9*12) / 17 = 70.01...
If we further eliminate the January 9th shooting a school bus as it was neither at school not was it a firearm (pellet gun), not that they cannot be lethal. the math becomes
(88,182 + 33,619+ 6,742) / (8*12) / 17 = 78.76...
All numbers and odds of being in danger at school aside any shooting injury or death is a tragedy, regardless of where it occurs or the age of the victim. At the very least, we should be able to have the conversation of what reasonable measures to prevent needless deaths are in terms of resources to enforce existing laws and update databases, allowing gun violence to be researched, allowing purchase records to be digital inventoried, even allowing (if not requiring) private sales to use the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or addition gun control measure. Alas, we cannot seem to have a civil discussion on even one of those topics (even if we decided in the end to do nothing.)
But the conversation also needs to be truthful, a suicide in the parking lot of a school when school is empty should not be called a "school shooting." The focus on "assault rifles/weapons" is simply put focusing on a very small sub-set, most firearm murders where the weapon is identified are handguns by multi-fold margin (
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/expanded-homicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2010-2014.xls).