8 ms·

The upsetting part isn't the presence or absence in media reports of particular actors in school shootings. It's the fact that the 23 people killed in school s

• elamje 7y ago
  I do agree that news channels rarely cover the statistically significant story such as motor vehicle deaths, etc. However, I think their coverage pattern has a lot more to do with their incentive to maximize their own profit and tell the most inflammatory/engaging story. Cars killing someone isn’t as flashy as a man with a gun.
  • docbrown 7y ago
    Cars killing people also usually do not have a wide reaching effect beyond the community it happened in.
    • jMyles 7y ago
      I don't think that the particular cause of death has a dramatic impact on the wideness of the reach of the effect.
      • beatgammit 7y ago
        Well, it certainly does. 23 kids dying in a shooting incident is a lot more impactful than 3000 kids dying across the nation. One impacts nearly everyone with kids in a geographical area (many will need counseling), the other only impacts a couple families in a given geographical area.
        • jMyles 7y ago
          > 23 kids dying in a shooting incident I don't even know what you're referring to here. Sandy Hook I guess? That was 27. Other than that, there have been no mass shootings in schools with that many children killed since 1927. I was using 2018 numbers - 23 is the total number of people killed in mass shootings in or near schools throughout the US that year. It hurts to say this, but I think the sober reality is that this is a very small problem, affecting very few people. On the other hand, every community in the country is impacted by automobile impacts killing children.
      • happytoexplain 7y ago
        I disagree thoroughly. Murder always affects those metrics much more than accident. Mass murder more than individual crimes of passion. Freak accidents more than common accidents. Et cetera.
  • bearcobra 7y ago
    Provided there is some kind of malicious activity, like drunk driving or manufacturer negligence, I find there to be quite a bit of media coverage of motor vehicle deaths. I'd guess that our perception is that they don't cover it because there are so many distinct events which get short 1 minute nightly news stories, while school shootings tend to result in longer, more focused coverage.
• seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Let’s not forget kids starving to death in some parts of Africa while we are at it. And cancer, it kills a lot of kids every year also. So what does that have to do with school shootings? Isn’t this just a huge red herring? School shootings are not a leading cause of death for kids in the USA. Instead, they cause terror: freaking active shooter drills, metal detectors and security theater, armed campus officers, all the crap that I really don’t want my kids to go through.
  • jMyles 7y ago
    > School shootings are not a leading cause of death for kids in the USA. Instead, they cause terror: freaking active shooter drills, metal detectors and security theater, armed campus officers, all the crap that I really don’t want my kids to go through. Shooting incidents don't cause those things. Administrators and school boards who are unwilling to engage in thought leadership do.
    • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      The public demanded it! You can’t just be an administrator and say, “well, school shootings are bad, but statistically they aren’t a problem, so we don’t need to do anything.” Well, you can try to make this argument, but you’ll be out of your job quickly. Kids die in auto accidents at the rate of auto accidents, a tragedy, a common tragedy, so no one pays much attention to it. But school shootings, they aren’t common at all, they are horrific, and no one wants to be caught doing nothing about it, and since we can’t get rid of the guns in the USA, active shooter drills it is.
      • untog 7y ago
        To follow on from "the public demanded it" and bring it back to the original article... why is the media publishing these photos? Because the public want them to. The vast majority of newspapers are profit making enterprises, and they're giving customers what they want. Blaming the media here feels like missing the forest for the trees.
• jakear 7y ago
  Do you have some actionable ideas on how to prevent automotive deaths? Honest question.
  • jMyles 7y ago
    Indeed I do. 1) Cease all forms of oil and automobile subsidy. 2) (At the federal level) change the structure of infrastructure aid to states to incentivize pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure over automobiles. 3) Ensure the schools are accessible by pedestrians and cyclists and that they are located in areas which are surrounded by traffic-calming infrastructure. 4) (at the local level) build more curb-extensions, greenways, chicanes, diverters, and other structures to get cars away from schools, playgrounds, and other areas where kids play. There are sound, scientifically-backed tactics for doing this, but most of them require getting a place on the agendas of several legislative committees who are probably too busy talking about banning a particular color rifle or some other asinine thing.
    • cameronbrown 7y ago
      > Cease all forms of oil and automobile subsidy. So punish the poor, basically? Bicycles just don't cut it. The better alternative is more investment in public transport which I assume has a better safety record than private vehicles.
      • ip26 7y ago
        I didn't realize oil & gas subsidies were a social program.
        • cameronbrown 7y ago
          They're not - but you've still got to think about these second order effects. Politicians wouldn't implement this because for every less well off individual they push closer to poverty, that's one less vote.
        • gridlockd 7y ago
• docbrown 7y ago
  >It's the fact that the 23 people killed in school shootings in 2018 - tragic as these deaths are - have managed to take away all the attention from the over 3,000 children killed by motor vehicles that year. Should we really be comparing the two? I mean, even as a teenage driver, you are warned about the dangers of distracted driving, DD, etc. Automobile accidents are a common occurrence and a risk that people willingly take and accept whenever they enter their car. I’ve seen multiple stories in a night about automobile crashes on my local news and not national, which is how it should be. Auto accidents usually only affect the community it happened in, not the US as a whole. When we understand the damage—physical and mental—gun violence causes to society as a whole compared to auto accidents, it is no surprise that gun violence is a much more out-of-left-field event than an auto accident. To combat this, though, would you suggest we ban all motor vehicles? You see how silly that is to read? Even if it is silly to you, attempting to regulate the automotible industry would be a lot harder than putting limitations on available guns. Hell, we don’t even have a solid public transportation system that would be able to handle all of the commuters who gave up their cars to combat the auto accident statistics.
  • jMyles 7y ago
    > To combat this, though, would you suggest we ban all motor vehicles? You see how silly that is to read? I assert that this is a naked strawman. Do you think that Vision Zero and similar projects deserve such a simplistic response? There are proven ways to reduce automobile deaths, but they require political will and action.
  • javagram 7y ago
    > To combat this, though, would you suggest we ban all motor vehicles? You see how silly that is to read? Even if it is silly to you, attempting to regulate the automotible industry would be a lot harder than putting limitations on available guns. The main way to prevent these types of mass shootings would be to ban almost all guns. Some might say that is also “silly” to read. Politicians typically point to a specific type such as military-style semiautomatic rifles (“assault weapons”) that are scary—looking but aren’t especially deadly or even commonly used for mass shootings. This most recent mass shooting was committed with a .45 pistol. Unlike car ownership, gun ownership is also a constitutional right here in the USA, which means you’d need a huge supermajority to repeal that portion of the constitution.
• cheerlessbog 7y ago
  What reason do you have to believe we can't tackle both problems at once? Society confronts countless major problems concurrently. You could equally argue that every moment spent considering automobile accidents is time that could be better spent confronting climate change.
• jhurliman 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
• yumraj 7y ago
  I'm not sure I agree as we cannot put accidental deaths, even with large total numbers, and mass homicide in the same bucket. Moreover, when there were mass accidental deaths, as in the case of recent Boeing Max's, there was enough coverage.
  • NullPrefix 7y ago
    >Moreover, when there were mass accidental deaths, as in the case of recent Boeing Max's, there was enough coverage. You mean mass negligence deaths?
    • yumraj 7y ago
      Yes. I had simply said accidental to differentiate from homicide, but you are right. Perhaps they were even mass manslaughter, but that is for a court to decide.
• gridlockd 7y ago
  > I can't help but notice that the media of the US is very reluctant to shine a light on an epidemic whose solution invariably involves cutting into the profits of its oil and automobile sponsors. The media is reluctant to shine a light on behavior where the viewer is responsible. The media knows very well that their average viewer is an irresponsible fool, but they also know that viewers don't like to be lectured to. It also just so happens that large parts of the US are either unlivable without a car, or unaffordable. That's just the reality, maybe a 50-year infrastructure plan on behalf of chairman Sanders will change that, but not much else. > Every time you hear about guns killing children, challenge the narrative by saying, "is talking about this taking away from our opportunities to rethink some of our car-dominated infrastructure?" The word for that kind of behavior is "whataboutism". It's not going to win you anything.
• philwelch 7y ago
  It’s not even car accidents. Roughly 300 Americans die every year from getting tangled in their bedsheets. Mass shootings tend to be 1/10th as deadly as bedsheets, and approximately as deadly as dog bites.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• simion314 7y ago
  Car accidents happen so often hat people would probably demand not to see daily this tragic events. When I was a child (25 years ago) we had only 1 TV channel, and weekly there was 30 minutes broadcast only about road accidents, it was created in collaboration with the police and the purpose was educative, to show the consequences of not respecting the rules. The problem this days is that media needs to make money and not to educate, even the national TV and radio needs to compete with the private TV so everything now is similar on all channels mostly. Edit: I still see traffic accidents reportd on our local news here, is this not happening in US but on the local news? Or is your point that there should be a news item for each car accident, I don't think you can compare a regular accident with a mass shooting though, maybe with a regular shooting. a mass shooting is more like an accident involving a bus full of children.
• rdiddly 7y ago
  It's not just the sponsors who have skin in that game, unfortunately - it's 95% of everybody. How many people bike or walk to work at a given media outlet? At a given school? Maybe one guy they all think of as eccentric, plus an intern who's young and broke? The rest [Edit: ...who don't take transit] drive because (ironically) the number of cars on the roads makes it too unsafe to do anything but add another car. [Edit: Or because they bought a house so far from work that it would be an athletic event they're not up for.] How do you get someone to confront a problem where they are the shooter?
• Alex3917 7y ago
  All new cars sold in the US are going to have basic self-driving ability in less than four years. So that is already going to eventually reduce deaths by up to 80%.
• newsguy212 7y ago
  Quasi burner account here -- I've worked in news my entire adult life, and have thought about this stuff a lot -- and why we cover the things we do. Let's look at this through the lens of something less emotionally fraught. My girlfriend used to be absolutely terrified to fly. I kept telling her that we were way more likely to get into an accident in the Uber on the way to the airport than the flight itself, but that didn't always help. She may have understood that intellectually, but emotionally, there was a disconnect. Here's my hypothesis: - News Coverage -- (and ill get to this more in a sec.) The news (at least in any decent size market) cannot POSSIBLY cover every motor vehicle crash. They are far too common, and, therefore, probably not news. I suppose you could cover something like an uptick in motor vehicle crashes, or an abnormally dangerous intersection, but at that point you're now talking about a trend and not a specific incident with specific victims, and you might as well be talking about a budget. - Fundamental understanding of the mechanics -- The average person can probably tell you why a car moves. Now, I am not saying they will be doing their own oil changes or any more serious car maintenance (I live in NYC and do not even own a car), but they can probably tell you about the pistons and the engine and how it turns the wheels and stuff. Ask an average person why a 175,000 lb metal jetliner can soar five miles over the surface of the earth for hours at a time, and I am less confident you will get a reasonable answer. And even if you do, there may be less of a connection between the words they are saying and whether or not they really believe it. Planes in the sky are magic. - Who is in control -- Most of the time if you are in a car, you are driving -- or, someone you know and trust is driving. (I say most because of cabs and Ubers and maybe a carpool that you just don't like.) Human beings tend to believe that THEY can avoid danger. Yes, those other people crashed their cars, but I'm a GOOD DRIVER. When you're in an airplane and watching "The Hangover II" (what an amazingly bad movie, btw) you have to trust a stranger to fly this thing that you don't really understand (see above point.) So -- same thing with mass shootings. They're rare (or at least used to be, I do wonder if the recent uptick in shootings is having an effect on people's interest, though thats another issue. They are still rare, compared to things like car crashes.) - We can cover school/workplace/church/etc shootings because they're aren't 20 in an hour. - We don't really understand why someone would be driven to do this. Much like maybe knowing how a plane works, we may be able to spout talking points about mental health and access to weapons and all of that, but we (hopefully?) cannot REALLY understand what drives a person to wake up in the morning, assemble an arsenal, and murder a bunch of people. There's a form of fascination to this, regardless of how perverse. - Once again, we are not in control. We might be driving the car, and think we can swerve out of the way when we need to, but if you are sitting in an office/school/church and someone comes in firing an automatic weapon, you are fundamentally not in control of the situation. News reflects what people are interested in, or at least it should. For all of the talk about what the media covers, there really isnt a "THE MEDIA." The media is a group of people like me who live in communities and have friends and families, and -- I hate to break this to you -- while we may have pressures from external sources direct or indirect, we do not have weekly meetings where we conspire what agendas we want to push or make people fear. (They became monthly meetings because of a problem with the caterer.) People are afraid of school shootings, much like they can be afraid of plane crashes. They dont understand them. They fear not being in control. They are rare. It's harder to say "that won't be me. And so news covers it, and parents worry, and citizens demand solutions* *Also I hope it goes without saying that there SHOULD be a solution. We don't take car crashes lying down -- there are constant safety improvements added on to cars that have made driving fundamentally safer.