Violence in Schools: Do Parents Prepare Their Kids to Protect Themselves or Does the Responsibility Lie with the School?

I decided to research what is available online in regards to the topic of violence in schools. I did a search on the popular search engine: Google. At the time of my search query, there are 68,300,000 relevant links to the keyword phrase "violence in schools". Is violence in schools a popular topic? How does it compare to say, lunch in school? Wow, the phrase "school lunch" returned 3,510,000 links. The phrase "school shopping" revealed 413,000 links. This little experiment on the popular Google search engine would lead one to believe that yes, according to how much information is available online in regards to school violence, that it is indeed an important topic. I am assuming here that the amount of information available on a topic in relevant to how important it is. Do parents who send their children to school, think that the topic of school violence is important? Do parents think about protecting their kids from violence when they are making their back to school preparations? I wonder how often a parent sending a child to public school thinks about preparing that child on things other than how to study, how to listen in class, how to participate in physical education, what to wear, or how to make friends? Do they consider the possibility that they should prepare the child in regards to how to react if facing down the barrel of a gun? What to do if a stranger approaches them? Do parents speak to their children about what to do if violence breaks out on the school bus, or if they overhear a classmate talking about doing something violent at school? Or is it simply that preparing kids for going back to school involves buying new backpacks, pencils, notebooks, new clothes, shoes and other material items?

As a home school parent, I do not have to prepare my children to face the issue of violence in school; but the parents of the neighborhood kids, my children play with, do. These neighborhood kids are important to my children and over the years I have come to love their freckled faces and runny noses. I would like to think that my daughter's friends are safe at school. I investigated a bit more to find out just how widespread the problem is: