One week ago today, while many of us were rushing to pick up last-minute flowers, chocolates, and paper cards with amorous sentiments, Nikolas Cruz walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and murdered 17 people, 14 of which were students.

Rather than focus on Cruz, his mental stability, the lack of school security, or the failure of law enforcement to follow-up on a multitude of warnings, media attention quickly turned to one of the most deeply held values of the political left….gun control.

Now, the students are scheduling a “march on Washington”… that ubiquitous symbolic gesture that makes people feel good but hasn’t really accomplished anything since the early 1960s.  But hey…who doesn’t like a road trip and a reason to skip class!

As an economist, I am always drawn to look at the data.  Setting emotional hysterics aside, what does the data say?  This is why one of my favorite quotes (and often used here) is from John Adams who said, “facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”  Allow me to present some facts that are not in dispute.

First, school shootings are extremely rare.  How rare?  Since 1999, including Columbine, Sandy Hook, and now Stoneman Douglas, 71 students (defined here as ages 5-19) have been murdered in school shootings – an average of 3.5 per year against a student population of more than 62 million.  That represents 0.006 school shooting deaths annually per 100,000 school age children.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has some fantastic data on causes of death which can be found here.  Using this data, I want to provide some comparisons.   According to the CDC, the rate of death for the same age cohort over the same period from bathtub drownings is 0.038 per 100,000 students annually.  In other words, a student is 6 times more likely to drown in the bathtub than be shot at school.  Following the perverted logic of the outraged left, school students should be required, by law, to take showers, as baths are a clear and present danger to our children.

Similarly, the annual student death rate from skateboards/roller-skates over the same period is an astonishing 0.022 per 100,000 students annually!  I ask you, where is the national outrage?  A student is 3 times more likely to die falling off their skateboard than being shot in school.  Clearly, skateboards must be banned and their manufacturers held accountable for their callousness toward human life.

But, let’s step back from school shootings and look at ALL school age deaths by assault.  Over the past 20 years, there have been an average of .28 deaths per 100,000 students annually from assault by “sharp objects” while the death rate for students from assault using rifles over the same period is .14 per 100,000.  School age kids are two-times more likely to die from being assaulted by a “sharp object” (including knives) than a rifle (including shotguns and assault rifles).  And yet, surprisingly, no one has marched on Washington demanding a ban on machetes!

It turns out, that there are far more student deaths from assaults using handguns than rifles.  But even so, there have still been more student deaths resulting from assaults using sharp objects than from assaults using handguns in every year since 2000.

Some may ask, “then why does the U.S. have more deaths by guns than any other country in the world?”  Maybe it is for the same reason that Korea has more deaths from choking on kimchi than any other country in the world.  It is simply a function of numbers. There are more guns here than anywhere else…something the founding fathers thought was a good way to protect free people from a tyrannical government.

Is the prevalence of guns in our society the problem?  The data suggests that is not the case.  At least no more than the prevalence of bathtubs, skateboards, and “sharp objects” which combined take nearly 3,000 innocent school-age lives per year.

Rather than having a knee-jerk reaction to guns, perhaps, as we contemplate yet another school shooting, we should be asking ourselves if school shootings are the result of something else. Maybe, we don’t have a gun problem.  Maybe we have a culture problem.

There is an old proverb that says “it is a poor musician who blames his instrument.”  Instead of blaming the instrument, maybe we need to understand the culture that created the musician.  Otherwise, rather than a one-hit wonder, the tragic tune played out on Valentine’s Day at Stoneman Douglas may become a national anthem.