Yes. What would really "demonstrate an understanding of statistics and mathematics" would be recognizing that death by mass school shooting and death by meteor

Yes. What would really "demonstrate an understanding of statistics and mathematics" would be recognizing that death by mass school shooting and death by meteor are both extremely rare causes of death, and that spending school time on either is likely not a productive use of that time. I mean, some schools spend more time on that stuff than they do on earthquake, tornado, or fire drills. On top of that, and as you seem to suggest, the "training" is almost uniformly very, very bad.