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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.
I'm a little bit confused here.
Are you saying that school (or other mass) shootings are as "natural" as lightning?
@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.
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.
