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Mass elementary shootings in the US are presented as happening far more often then they do - I think there have been only two mass shootings at an elementary sc

Mass elementary shootings in the US are presented as happening far more often then they do - I think there have been only two mass shootings at an elementary school in the US in the last 20 years, with a total of 32 victim deaths. And remember, the US a has a large population - 60 times more people live here than in, say, Norway. So for a given incidence rate per capita, you would expect the US to have more. If you use per capita figures instead, in the past twenty years, more people have been killed by mass shootings (5 or more strangers), in Norway than in the US. (I totally cherry picked Norway, bad me! Though I could have also used France, which also had more per capita deaths from mass shootings than the US in the last five years.) Now it's still an absolute tragedy, but on the list of things to worry about, your child being killed in a mass elementary school shooting in the US is about an order of magnitude less likely that you being struck and killed by lighting.

magduf 8y ago
>And remember, the US a has a large population - 60 times more people live here than in, say, Norway. So for a given incidence rate per capita, you would expect the US to have more. In the past twenty years, more people have been killed by mass shootings (5 or more strangers), in Norway than in the US. Japan has a large population too, about 120M. But the US has 19 times the murder rate of Japan. I'm sorry, I don't buy the "large population" canard. Lots of European countries have large populations too: UK, Germany, France, Italy all have ~60-80M each. The US is not an order of magnitude greater than these. China has far more people than the US, yet it only has a murder rate of 0.62, compared to the US's 5.35. Japan's is 0.28. The US has a murder rate that compares with those in Sudan and Zimbabwe. But hey, at least we're not as bad as Brazil or El Salvador... /s
- danielvf 8y ago
  I'm talking about population numbers since it directly affects the odds that your kid would be killed.
  - magduf 8y ago
    No, per-capita rates, not absolute population numbers, are what directly affect the odds that anything will happen to you personally. That's why we have per-capita rates. The only place where per-capita comparisons really break down are for very tiny countries (micronations). When the population is only a few thousand, you can't get good statistical data from that as the sample size is too small, plus micronations just don't compare to real nations for many reasons. But that's not the issue here because we're comparing nations that all have populations well into the tens of millions or more.

magduf 8y ago

>And remember, the US a has a large population - 60 times more people live here than in, say, Norway. So for a given incidence rate per capita, you would expect the US to have more. In the past twenty years, more people have been killed by mass shootings (5 or more strangers), in Norway than in the US. Japan has a large population too, about 120M. But the US has 19 times the murder rate of Japan. I'm sorry, I don't buy the "large population" canard. Lots of European countries have large populations too: UK, Germany, France, Italy all have ~60-80M each. The US is not an order of magnitude greater than these. China has far more people than the US, yet it only has a murder rate of 0.62, compared to the US's 5.35. Japan's is 0.28. The US has a murder rate that compares with those in Sudan and Zimbabwe. But hey, at least we're not as bad as Brazil or El Salvador... /s

danielvf 8y ago
I'm talking about population numbers since it directly affects the odds that your kid would be killed.
- magduf 8y ago
  No, per-capita rates, not absolute population numbers, are what directly affect the odds that anything will happen to you personally. That's why we have per-capita rates. The only place where per-capita comparisons really break down are for very tiny countries (micronations). When the population is only a few thousand, you can't get good statistical data from that as the sample size is too small, plus micronations just don't compare to real nations for many reasons. But that's not the issue here because we're comparing nations that all have populations well into the tens of millions or more.