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I just want to say two important things..
First the recent school shooting is a tragedy and we should all be sad about the death of any children, especially as a victim of muder.
Second, we have to realize, for the sake ofperspective, how unfathomably rare it is for a child to die in a school shooting in america. It seems common because america is huge and the news makes this stuff public. But the numbers are more telling.
To put some numbers to it the chance of a child dyingin a school shooting in a public shool on any given day is 1 in 614 million. For comparison the chance of a person getting struck by lightening on any given day is **less** than 1 in 370 million.
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.
@freemo what about the chance of a child being traumatized by a school shooting? Surely that's far higher.
@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.
@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)
@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.