@trinsec

For one, lightning ‘just happens’. Best you can do is to educate people not to stand below trees during lightning storms and other good advice.

Not true, lightening is absolutely preventable. First, you will “feel” lightening about to strike minutes before hand, if people are taught this they can run to shelter or take other relevant steps, like lying down. They can also avoid tall objects.,

We can also take preventative measures in the form of lightening rods and even invest money in improving lightening rod technology.

If I had to guess it is probably cheaper and easier to prvent people getting struck by lightening than it would be to prevent school shootings.

For two, shootings can and should be preventable. There are many ways possible towards that goal, and not much action’s been taken so far if I have to believe the media. Just endless debates.

Well both are preventable (and i listed some ways above).. both being preventable we should invest in the infrastructure that is most common first.

Just because it happens less than lightning strikes, you shouldn’t do much effort against it? While it could possibly be prevented to begin with?

No one said you shouldnt do anything about it. The point is we should put much less priority on addressing it than we do other more common forms of injury.

Also there is a point where an event is so rare that its statistical noise. You can never eliminate something to 0, but you can reduce it. At a certain point it is redued enough that its not a concern. There is probably one person every hundred years that dies in a bird attack, do we bother trying to prevent bird attacks or do we just accept it is rare enough that it isnt really common enough to be a priority.

@freemo I’m about to go to bed but I really wanted to address this little one:

Not true, lightening is absolutely preventable. First, you will “feel” lightening about to strike minutes before hand, if people are taught this they can run to shelter or take other relevant steps, like lying down. They can also avoid tall objects.,

I think you are mistaken. It is not minutes, it often is mere seconds. In many cases you won’t have that much time to react. You will feel a sensation, possibly, yes. You’ll know that you might get struck, yes. You just won’t have much time to react to it.

And for the love of whatever gods, do NOT lie down. Keep your touching surface area to the floor as small as possible. If you have to low, go squat.

@trinsec I actually dont know how long the warning is that you “feel” it on average.. I was in a lightening strike once (not actually hit but a few feet away) and I felt it about a minute before hand, maybe a bit more.

@freemo @trinsec
I was was within 20' and felt and saw it about 15 seconds before.

@EvilK

Interesting, good to note.

@trinsec

@strawd Yup, it sure would be. But the chance of even just being at a school during a school shooting is a very rare occurance.. more common sure, but still safe to assert the fact that it is an extremely rare event no matter how you slice it for any child to be directly negativly effected by a school shooting.

@freemo if this number from WaPo can be believed, then there have been 348,000 students who have experienced gun violence at school since 1999. Divide by the number of US school-aged people since then (I got 147 million from quick addition of census data), and you get about 1 in 400.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/school-shootings-database/

@strawd No your numbers are wrong.. we are tlking per day...

so 348K students expiernced gun violence over the course of ~24 years...

348000/24/365 = 39 per day

How many school kids are there at any point in time on average? 55 million kids int he USA between 5 and 18 years old (all public grade schools)

So thats 39 per 55 million. or a 1 in 1.4 million chance of a child being exposed to gun violence in their school on any given day.

This all assumes the original stats are true which i didnt fact check.

@freemo fair enough, the 1/400 number isn't directly comparable to the daily risk numbers you used for the original stats.

On the other hand, when considering lightning strikes, the risk assessment question one might ask is "is it worth the risk to go outside today?", whereas the question one might ask (and I have asked myself many times) w.r.t. gun violence in schools is "is it worth the risk to raise my kids in the US?". In my opinion it's worth the risk to go outside regularly despite the 1/15,300 (https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-odds) chance of being struck by lightning in a lifetime, but it's seriously debatable whether or not it's worth a 1/400 chance per kid (ack: not entirely independent variables) to have them exposed to school gun violence.

@strawd Yea, but I also think the current framing, in that regard, is short sighted.

The numbers generall show that when you reduce access to guns that overall violent acts increase significantly and usually never recover or improve, at least not in the vast majority of countries that went through this. In particular sexual assault tends to spike rather aggressively as a consequence of gun bans.

We would have to run the numbers to get real numbers but if we did you might find the argument is more like "Would I be willing to trade a 1L400 chance of my child being somewhere in the general area where gun violence takes place and a 1:6 chance of being raped... or would i rather be in an environment where guns are banned so the chance of my child being exposed to it is say, 1:1000, but now your chance of being raped is 1:2.

Obviously these are just made up numbers, we should run real ones.. but the point is there is a trade off. Ban guns and yea you might reduce the number of gun related traumas, but now you have just increased the number of rape related traumas but a much much larger number.

@freemo yeah my risk assessment compares where the US is to where other countries are, not to where the US could be with changes in laws. It may be that there is no good way to come back from where we are in the US, but I hope not. I don't know what specific actions can reduce gun violence, and I'm not advocating for trying to ban all guns.

@strawd And that comparison is how any person int he real world would do it...but now we moved completely away from discussion on gun laws at all then... Whatever the homicide, gun death, or rape rates may be, overall they are not dictated by gun laws alone... there are countless factors that result in those numbers...

There are many countries that have far higher homicide rates thaan america who have no guns, and many places with guns and lower rates.. because the risks are not determined by gun ownership alone or even necceseraly the most significant determining factor... so you are evaluate everything about a country.... so you arent even taking about guns anymore at all other than as a side note at that point.

@freemo your original post here asked whether or not it was a common enough occurrence to be a huge concern, and I think the answer is yes

@strawd Sure, you are welcome to that opinion. and I think something that happens 1 in 600+ million is more than rare enough to not be a concern... I also think that while many more might be "exposed " to it hby it happening somewhere in the general facinity is not nearly as traumatizing and thus also a somewhat acceptable outcome.. I mean, they probably included shooting that were "around the block" and their total interaction with it was to hear a pop and hide or maybe not even that, all they hear is the talk at the school about it the next day.

I know when i was in school i was exposed to a shooting.. never even knew it happened right next to me but the cops were there and IU drove past it.. I know someone was killed but since you never see or hear the event or anything it really had no traumatic effect to me at all.. So while I dont like to see those sorts of things happening I dont think its quite as traumatic as the numbers might suggest (as I said id have dif deeper into yoiur source to know the definition)

@SpaceLifeForm That was **not** what I said... I said the chance of a child being struck by lightening in a day... I did not say the lightening strike would happen while they were indoors... could happen on the way to school, on the way home, during recess, or any other time of the day.

@freemo

Noted.

It is still an apple and oranges comparison.

These MCIs are preventable, but we really have no control over thunderstorms at all.

We can make the odds better.

@SpaceLifeForm

>It is still an apple and oranges comparison.

It is absolutely an apples and orange comparison. As I pointed out this is about showing how astronomically rare this events are.. it is also about showing that with lightening striking kids being twice as likely that we should prioritize preventing that over preventing school shootings.. yet thats not what we do, you hear about school shootings every day and the outrage yet no one is outraged we arent doing anything about all the kids gettign struck by lightening.

> These MCIs are preventable, but we really have no control over thunderstorms at all.
>
> We can make the odds better.

Thunderstorms arent preventable but lightening strikes absolutely are. In fact its much cheaper, easier, and straightforward to prevent lightening strikes than it is to prevent school shootings.

1) you can feel a lightening strike coming minutes before hand. You can respond to this by taking certain actions (running away, lying down, seeking shelter). Better education on this would help prevent

2) More, taller, or better grounding lightening rods are well proven to prevent lightening strikes. Investing in lightening rod infrastructure would go a long way to reduce these numbers significantly and is far easier and straight forward than any solutions we could come up with to prevent school shootings. Not to mention cheaper.

@peterdrake

Absolutely.. which is also a much more involv4ed topic.

For starters I have absolutely no desire to prevent means of suicide. While I do wish to prevent the desire to commit suicide with better mental health and better home environments I am of the opinion that a person has a right to bodily autonomy and that includes suicide. As tragic as it is every person has a right to commit suicide and while we do want to prevent the numbers through mental health what we dont want to do is take away the means of suicide, because in the end that is everyones sacred right IMO (And yes i know many will disagree).

Now when we talk about murder thats even more questionable because any serious and object statistical analysis (which would have to use granger causality or a similar causality test) very clearly shows that banning or restricting access to guns almost always results in an increase in overall murder and violent crimes. So while murder in all forms, including with guns, should be prevented, if we actually try to ban or restrict guns you are doing the exact opposite of your intent.

@trinsec

@freemo @trinsec

At the risk of diving into statistical weeds deeper than my understanding, there is a strong positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates:

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-gun-ownership-homicide-stronger.html

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/

Returning to your original post, there were 745 US deaths in mass shootings in 2021. Only 11 Americans were killed by lightning that year. (By odd coincidence, that was a record high year for gun deaths and a record low year for lightning deaths. There were a total of 444 lightning deaths from 2006 through 2021, an average of 27.75 per year.)

To say that lightning is more dangerous than mass shootings is wildly inaccurate. Comparing all PEOPLE killed by lightning to CHILDREN killed specifically in mass shootings AT PUBLIC SCHOOLS is cherry-picking.

It's a pretty safe bet that there will be multiple mass shootings in the US next week and there will not be multiple Americans killed by lightning.

@peterdrake @trinsec

At the risk of diving into statistical weeds deeper than my understanding, there is a strong positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates:

I have spoken out on this as a professional data scientists many times. This sort of analysis is overwhelmingly dishonest for anyone with any training in data science who makes any attempt at being objective, and there is a reason for this.

That same correlation you show, guess what, youd see the same thing if you compared mental health access, or poverty levels, or any number of factors that lead to people being more or less healthy well rounded people. This is exactly why it is extreme intellectual dishonesty, you have no clue what of the countless factors are causing this, and as we all know correlation doesnt even hint at causality, it si corelation.

Now we do have something that is strongly suggestive of causality, they are called causality tests in statistics, and while they arent perfect anyone trying to be intellectually honest would use this method for decided how to analyze the situation. The simplest of these is called granger causality. When you do this form of analysis you more or less rule out other confounding factors by looking at the change in one value as another value changes. For example we look at.. does homicide rates go up when guns are banned, and vice versa.. you look for one event following another.

And guess what, when we provide these intellecually honest methods tot he data we see a very clear trend where banning guns tend to make violent acts and rapes skyrocket, and reversing bans on guns tend to cause those rates to drop (see some examples attached)

Returning to your original post, there were 745 US deaths in mass shootings in 2021. Only 11 Americans were killed by lightning that year. (By odd coincidence, that was a record high year for gun deaths and a record low year for lightning deaths. There were a total of 444 lightning deaths from 2006 through 2021, an average of 27.75 per year.)

Why did you just run odds on something different than what I stated? No one was talking about mass shootings or lightening deaths, nor do those numbers have relevance to the point being made, which was that using school shootings as a political point to create action is pointless since they are exceedingly rare… I never argued mass killings (by gun or any other means) was something we shouldnt address

To say that lightning is more dangerous than mass shootings is wildly inaccurate. Comparing all PEOPLE killed by lightning to CHILDREN killed specifically in mass shootings AT PUBLIC SCHOOLS is cherry-picking.

At no point did I, or anyone, make this claim. I never said lighting was more dangerous, I said it was more common to be struck by lightening, again, to make the point about how rare school shootings are, not to depict the danger of lightening.

@freemo @trinsec

First, on the question of correlation vs causality, my understanding is that there are four possible explanations for a strong correlation between A and B:

1) It’s a coincidence. Significance tests and replication can rule this out.
2) A causes B.
3) B causes A.
4) A and B are both caused by a third factor.

Does this match your understanding? If so, which one do you think is at play here (where A is high gun ownership rate and B is high homicide rate)?

Your one example does show a spike a few years later, but it disappears immediately. What we ideally need is a control country that is like Ireland in every other way but didn’t confiscate guns in 1972. Without this policy, aside from the one-year spike, would homicide rates increase, stay steady, or decrease?

Now, on to questions of misattribution.

Your specific original claim was:

–
In other words a child is more than twice as likely in the USA to get struck by lightening as they are to die in a school shooting.

Should we still mourne and be outraged by it… sure.. does that mean it is a problem that is common enough to be a huge concern… not really. We should probably put more effort into addressing the “lightening problem” than we should be about addressing school shootings.

(BTW, is there an easy way to quote text with >?)

I read two things into this. Let me know if I’ve misinterpreted you.

1) The media overemphasizes school shootings specifically. Your child is extremely unlikely to die this way.

(I’ll grant you this one; see also plane crashes and shark attacks.)

2) Because of these splashy mass shootings, the media makes too big a deal out of gun deaths. It would make more sense to worry about lightning, which is more likely to kill you.

It is to this second implication that I am reacting. That is why I brought out the general mass shooting numbers.

(I assume being hit by lightning is almost always fatal, so I didn’t distinguish between being hit or killed.)

If you “never argued mass killings (by gun or any other means) was something we shouldnt address”, I apologize for misreading that.

How do you suggest we address that problem?

@peterdrake

1) It’s a coincidence. Significance tests and replication can rule this out.
2) A causes B.
3) B causes A.
4) A and B are both caused by a third factor.

So.. this is sorta valid but a gross oversimplification. As a professional who tries to do this stuff quite often it might help if i explain how we map these things…

So A causing B is what we call a “conditional probability”. In reality there isnt just “some third factor” but a huge map of conditional probabilities with A effecting B effecting C and D effects B as well, etc etc. So we have a MAP of probability. We call this a “graphical model”. The job of a data scientist is to discover that graphical model, define the probabilities between the individual links, and from that model the events.

When your graphical model is incomplete and you have influencing factrs you havent mapped we call that “confounding”, sorta.

Your one example does show a spike a few years later, but it disappears immediately. What we ideally need is a control country that is like Ireland in every other way but didn’t confiscate guns in 1972. Without this policy, aside from the one-year spike, would homicide rates increase, stay steady, or decrease?

You are correct of course that I am giving somewhat shallow arguments here, largely because if i get too technical it will probably be too complex for the scope here When I discuss this issue with fellow data scientists our models are far more involved. I am trying more to show the simple to understand elements that are part of a much bigger and more rigorous line of research one would need to do.

(BTW, is there an easy way to quote text with >?)

You just have to do it manually as far as i know :(

1) The media overemphasizes school shootings specifically. Your child is extremely unlikely to die this way.

Yes this was one of my main points

2) Because of these splashy mass shootings, the media makes too big a deal out of gun deaths. It would make more sense to worry about lightning, which is more likely to kill you.

That was more for dramatic effect than a literal point, no.. My point is more that both of these things are such exceedingly rare events they arent really worth being our focus.. Problems with overall violence, and if guns have a role worth considering in that, is the bigger issue.

(I assume being hit by lightning is almost always fatal, so I didn’t distinguish between being hit or killed.)

90% of people struck by lightening survive actually.

If you “never argued mass killings (by gun or any other means) was something we shouldnt address”, I apologize for misreading that.

Mass killings, and really any killings, are a huge problem that needs addressing… Guns just arent really the problem anymore than spoons are the problem when it comes to physical health in the USA… our problem is lack of access to mental health, and generally poor environment.

Ironically this problem is usually very much exemplified in most internet threads on gun violence where people are so hateful and toxic to eachother it gets vile, demonstrating the very mental-health issue driving the violence, far more than the guns.

How do you suggest we address that problem?

1) is the hardest solution, its social.. we have to teach people to be caring to other people, something that as i point out, is usually at its most vile when we discuss these topics.

2) prioritize access to mental health.. im not talking asbout fixing healthcare, thats just aprt of it, but also normalizing mental health and psychiatry and many other aspects.

@trinsec

@kristofor Dont be an idiot, that was not the intent. People want to talk about it, great. But instead of being an ass and resorting to personal attacks because you dont like the way the converssation went be mature about it and jump in and steer the conversation to the points you feel are important.. you have the mike, talk tell us whats important, I know ill be happy to respond as well others, at least, as long as you stop with bad-faith nonsense.

@PiedraFiera Absolutely true, I was not trying to calculate the total global impact on everyone from these events.

@freemo
Sure I get it, just mentioning that the impact is large and very significant. Surviving such events as a child, or just having them happen within your development, may have profound consequences, like life long propensity to PTSD, depression, anxiety, suicide.. I think it does warrant huge concern.

I also believe addressing it, should go beyond access to guns, because the US has deep issues that should also warrant huge concern. Like all the wars they get involved in, directly or by proxy.

@PiedraFiera

Yea
, though id imagine the number of kids who have ptsd because they were in a school shooting is likely in the one in hundred million range. So still pretty rare.

@freemo
USA Adults that were taught as children what to do in case of a nuclear attack, describe the negative life long impact it had on them, growing up believing they might have to face that. Entire generations were impacted. Sure some individuals suffered more than others but the consequences were generalized.
Children that nowadays have to participate in school shooter drills are also impacted. Entire generations are being impacted.
Not to mention, indirect consequences, like teachers quitting or money being diverted for that instead of other stuff.
I fear for the rest of the world, because these generations of US children will manifest their trauma not only within the US, this will affect foreign policy and geopolitics.

@PiedraFiera

Even if we reduced gun shootings to one every 10 years we woukd still be teaching kids these lessons becauae preparing them saves lives, even jf jts rare we want to save lives....

Are we really going to claim now that measures which safe childrends lives in shootings are part of the problem?

Teaching kids how tonsurvive a tornado is fairly similar and dangerous.. yea its stressful but kids are more than strong enough to do drills, and thry are and always shoukd be good practice.

@freemo
If children's well being was really a priority, there would be free school lunches, free healthcare for everybody, free housing, inexpensive quality food and education, salaries that actually allowed people to own their house and have control of their lives, one month vacations per year, no involving yourselves in wars which should not concern you...
Politicians and intellectuals love invoking the wellbeing of the children to advance their interests, but do not push agendas that actually promote children's well being. Maybe they fear destroying the perfect cause they invoke to promote their interests.

@pj i am not. I am saying it is half as common as lightening to get killed in a school shooting.

@freemo
I do not agree with this statement:

“We should probably put more effort into addressing the “lightening problem” than we should be about addressing school shootings.”

The question is: “What can we do about it as a society?”

You can see the storm coming and you can choose not to go outside or you may try to find shelter and protect yourself in some other way, but a child who has to be in school supposedly safe under adult supervision doesn’t have such a privilege.

How can we consider ourselves a civilized society if we don’t have the means to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of individuals that should not have them?

You need a license to drive a car and you can’t buy cigarettes and alcohol under a certain age but you can carry a gun or even an army-style assault rifle no questions asked.

@freemo

Interesting theory about why guns are so loved in the US:

White Southerners started cultivating the tradition of the home arsenal immediately after the Civil War because of insecurities and racial fears. During the rest of the 19th century, those anxieties metamorphosized into a fetishization of the firearm to the point that, in the present day, gun owners view their weapons as adding meaning and a sense of purpose to their lives.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-gun-became-integral-to-the-self-identity-of-millions-of-americans/

@pj @freemo preventing the crown from disarming everyone again to rule over them is why its in the bill of rights.

racists trying to kill black people (who defended themselves with rifle) is why modern gun control was made.

@icedquinn @pj

Sounds about right.

@pj @freemo My understanding is that this concern goes back to the founding of the USA and that the 2nd amendment “well regulated militia” refers to concerns of white Southerners about their ability to respond to slave rebellions. Like Harper’s Ferry.

@rrb @pj

The militia thing was hardly a slave rebellion idea. I mean thr northwas just as well armed and there were concerns about oppressive governemnts. Dont get me wrong slave rebellion was probably a factor too, but it was really a long list of concerns fueling the mentality

@freemo @pj Sources for my comment:

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002107670/historian-uncovers-the-racist-roots-of-the-2nd-amendment\

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/second-amendment-slavery-james-madison.html

I take that view from the publications of these historians.

The often stated view of individuals being armed against the government seems to me to be a bit shakier in view of how the fledgling US government responded to things like the Whiskey rebellion. If they sincerely wanted individuals to be able to shoot federal agents, they would not have responded so strongly to those attacks.

@rrb @pj

Fair. I suspect the desire to be armed against a slave rebellion is why today the south is a bit more gun happy… but still doesnt explain why the north was so progun as well.

@freemo @pj Slavery was definitely not the only factor in drafting the 2nd amendment.

Also, the colonies were more rural at that time than most of the USA is now and the country as a whole was in a more precarious state.

I feel that a lot of the division on gun rights in the USA is a rural/urban divide. Living at my uncle’s ranch in West Texas, you really need a gun for pest control, etc. In the college town where I live now, a gun really has zero utility. So residents of those two regions will have a legitimate difference of opinion.

Finding that guns provide a “sense of meaning to your life” as stated in the Scientific American article is not something I would be able to accept anyway. Neither do I get a sense of self from my car, house, etc.

@rrb @freemo

Many, especially younger, people get a sense of self from things such as guns, cars, and boats, but that’s not the point.

A “well-regulated militia” doesn’t mean everyone can simply buy an assault rifle at the nearby grocery store. You can’t do this in Switzerland or Israel where I believe everyone that is supposed to, have a gun, but, afaik, there are no mass shootings like in the US.

Something is wrong with a society where you can’t drive a car without a permit or even a medical exam if you are of a certain age, but you can own a gun without any restrictions.

@pj @rrb

A well regulayed militia is not the sole protecyion of thr second ammendment. It is added as an exemplifying claise not a qualifying clause. This has been clearly established by the authors.

We have more than enough quotes from the authors to know they very clearly meant everyone had unrestricted access to weaponry (even heavy artillary)

@freemo @pj Do you have citations for those quotes?

It does not seem to match actions of the US government at that time. (ex. Whiskey rebellion).

@rrb @pj

Ive shared tons of quotes along those lines before. Id have to dig them up again.. i remember in one case one of the fiunding fathers talking about how the mikitia meant “all the people”, we have an example of the governement when it was new and the foubding fathers were still politicians explixitly approving private purchase of cannons, all sorts of thjngs, but id need to dig it all up again. I am on my phone so will have to do that from my computer

@rrb @pj

“A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined…”

• George Washington

“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”

• Thomas Jefferson

“The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

• Thomas Jefferson

“The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed.”

• Thomas Jefferson

“I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.”

• George Mason

@rrb @pj

This is all from a quick search. Being on my phone i didnt have time to verify them so you may want to double check them.

@freemo @pj That is good.

Thanks.