Ridiculous? Unwarranted? Further, ridiculously unwarranted?? All three are stretches as it pertains to concern about this issue.
I think that Xman's point was not that your positon is not irrational for being concerned about a potential danger in your class room - as you are in any public setting -, but that you are being irrational suggesting that your class room might be more dangerous than a traditional hotbed of crime.
School shootings make news not because of their frequency, but because of their infrequency.
I don't think it is at all irrational to
feel that a setting in which I am more aware of my surroundings could potentially be safer for me, even given its history of violence, which in truth, was more often targeted than random and certainly not mass. Concentrated, yes, but not mass.
I want to be clear on my point: I'm not saying that Harlem is safter than a classroom. I'm saying that it is not unreasonable for me to
feel uncomfortable in a setting in which I am less aware of my surroundings, especially an environment that has been targeted lately for random acts of mass violence.
And when it happens once, its one too many times. When it happens twice, that's two too many times, and it is cause for pause and to wonder if it will become a trend. I'm not concerned about the fact that its prevalence (or lack thereof as you claim) is being captured by the media. I'm concerned that it's happening in the first place. In any case, I don't think its a persuasive argument to say that its occurrence is infrequent as opposed to frequent which is why the news covers it. I'm not convinced that frequency is even relevant to the media in this case. the nature of the crime is certainly a determining factor too, if not the only.