I'm surprised it's that high at all given the likelihood that a child will ever be in a school shooting. It's not quite in lottery-winning territory, but as a child you are more likely to be killed by a vehicle than a gun by several orders of magnitude. It's not even close.
It's a good example of the media shifting our fear to the wrong thing.
I completely agree regarding the media being terrible at discussing risk. However, I do think the attention is somewhat warranted because every other developed nation in the world has solved this problem (as is made abundantly clear in another thread in this same post). If the solution is so obvious, why not implement it and start saving lives?
Lastly (and somewhat pedantically) I'm not sure about your "several orders of magnitude" remark. Could you elaborate? Wikipedia[0] says that about four times as many Americans die in traffic collisions each year as die from firearms (once you take out the 2/3 of firearms deaths that are suicides).
It's a good example of the media shifting our fear to the wrong thing.