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> School shootings are such a regular feature of American life […] Media certainly amplifies the awareness of problems Case in point: in 2022 there were 51 sch

• NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
  I would add that many of the "school shootings" counted in the edweek.org data are not what most people would understand to be school shootings. Things like Person A shoots Person B outside of a school, nobody dies, neither A or B are students, teachers, or otherwise affiliated with the school. Edweek is providing what are known as "advocacy numbers", in that they are stretching the truth as much as they possibly can. Your kid's chances of being killed in a school shooting are about the same as being struck and killed by lightning (many more people are struck and survive).
• jiggywiggy 3y ago
  Come on. What point are you arguing? I know you are most likely anti school shootings. But whats the point of trying to deny it's impact with statistics? Whatever statistics you try to conjure. 52 in one year is way too much. And 1 in 150 kids being on a school with a school shooting is a lot.
  • the_lonely_road 3y ago
    It’s a political issue not mired in reality but instead in a desire to affect policy. They do it because it works. This discussion is an example of it’d effectiveness. People who will look to the statistics for context in other situations are quick to dismiss them here. There is no rational reason to be anymore concerned about school shootings in America than any other cause of premature death in children and quite a bit of reason to be less concerned. If you want to protect your children focus on drugs, cars, and military recruiters.
    • JoeyJoJoJr 3y ago
      A society that tolerates school shootings isn’t going to give any shits about drugs, car accidents, or military recruiters.
      • hndamien 3y ago
        It reminds me of the song, "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next." That said, I think prescription drugs are probably more part of the problem than is widely acknowledged.
    • jiggywiggy 3y ago
      You are crazy. No healthy society has school shootings and it has no place in it. To accept anything less then a healthy and violence & gunfree place our kids can grow up in is insane.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • v0idzer0 3y ago
    Statistic don’t affirm or deny impact. They are facts. The rest is left to you. Why are you trying to exaggerate its impact by suggesting we suppress statistics (facts)?
    • jiggywiggy 3y ago
• poulsbohemian 3y ago
  I'm sure you mean well, but do you understand that even one school shooting in a year should be unthinkable? Do you not understand that ever child in this country is acutely aware of the existence of school shootings and for many of them it absolutely is a cause of significant anxiety?
  • lumb63 3y ago
    Yes, I understand. Do you not understand that every child in this country is acutely aware of the existence of school shootings, and for many of them it absolutely is a cause of significant anxiety, because the media has shown them school shootings, and has told them to be anxious about them? Look at death statistics for young people [1]. There are many causes of death which children are not scared of, despite them being far more likely to occur than school shootings. [1]: https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/home https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/home
    • kredd 3y ago
      You’re arguing 0.7% chance of being in a school shooting shouldn’t worry a teenager, for other commentators that’s just a mind-blowing percentage. I think that’s a cultural distinction, since if that was the case, most of people I know would do anything that’s possible to avoid their child to beat that statistic.
      • NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
        That's a cumulative 0.7% chance over 18 (or 22?) years, or 0.035%-ish per year. Not only is that not the right way to think about things even if shootings were random, the numbers aren't correct. The Edweek numbers are doing what they were designed to do, which is mislead you and parent / grandparent. They are advocacy numbers, deliberately distorted to make things seem as bad as possible in order to drive clicks to further their political agenda. Which is exactly what's happening here! You could read the edweek links, or the comment by jlawson, or you could do some math yourself. School shootings (in the meaningful sense, not the BS sense that edweek uses--shootings where a student is killed, which is what people really mean) are vanishingly rare in the U.S., a nation of 300,000,000 people. "Preparing" for them is the result of innumeracy, anxiety, fear-mongering, profitability of reporting on them, and lack of critical thinking skills in the U.S. population. The risk is so small that counteracting basically any other risk is a better use of resources. Teach kids about drugs. Teach them about driving safely. Teach them about how to be safe around pools, and how to swim. Teach them to eat healthy. Build them some exercise habits. An hour invested in any of these activities is much better-spent than an hour of hand-wringing about an almost nonexistent risk of your kid being shot in school in the U.S. It's simple math.
• burnished 3y ago
  So not quite one in a thousand? I don't feel like you are making the case that this is uncommon.
• jlawson 3y ago
  People are getting confused by the number posted which is badly distorting the discussion. 51 is NOT the number of intentional massacres of students or staff. It is the number of shootings on school grounds of all types _including accidents_. Here is a real example from the list: "A student was shot and injured when a sheriff’s deputy’s gun accidentally discharged in a classroom during a law enforcement vocational training." Another: "A male student shot and injured an 18-year-old student. Police say the shooting appeared to have resulted from a dispute between the students." Read down the list and most are accidents, or take place outside the school (e.g. in parking lots) between 2-3 people. These are accidents and individual beefs between students. They have nothing to do with mass murder. They don't involve anyone outside the students concerned. You could be a student at a school during one of these "school shootings" and not even be aware of it. It's why the _total_ number of deaths is only 40 (!) from those 51 shootings. 8 of those were teachers so the total number of student deaths was only 32. "School shootings" in the sense of intentional mass murders are nearly nonexistent. The overwhelming majority of damage related to these events is caused by the media and institutions irresponsibly generating fear that creates real psychological problems and distorts decision-making. The fact that so many here on all sides seem to think that intentional massacres could possibly be happening on a weekly basis in America is a testament to the distortionary power of the media. The reality is simply nothing like that.
  • escapedmoose 3y ago
    Man, I don’t know what to say. 32 student deaths from on-campus shootings in a single year still seems outrageously high to me.
    • jlawson 3y ago
      Every year in America 900 kids age 0-19 die from drowning. 3,058 teenagers ages 13-19 die in motor vehicle crashes. [0] In a country of 332,000,000 people, if 32 deaths stemming from parking lot arguments seems to require a society-wide blanket of fear and dramatic political anger, you are just badly miscalibrated. You're thinking like it's a village, which is natural, but if you want to discuss broad issues at scale, you need to put on your adult-style numerical/comparative thinking hat. "One is too many" sloganeering is simply a path to stupidity at scale. It distracts badly from things that actually matter and we end up way worse off in every respect. Also worth noting that based on these data it is more or less completely true that a random student doesn't need to worry about school shootings for their own personal safety at all. If you don't choose to get involved in armed parking lot arguments over girls or respect or drugs, you'll be fine. (However, please wear your seatbelt and choose your driver carefully!) https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/teenagers https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/teena...
• nullsense 3y ago
  Or, you know, compare the number of school shootings to literally any other country in the world? The fact that there are school shootings for the media to report on at all is so crazy to me.
  • theGnuMe 3y ago
    American’s think guns keep them free. In fact they just hold them hostage.
    • clove 3y ago
      "American is think guns keep them free. In fact Americans just hold guns hostage." What a sentence.
      • anigbrowl 3y ago
        You might want to reread the HN guidelines. While the comment was clumsily worded, the meaning was quite obvious.
  • lumb63 3y ago
    Why do you care so much about school shootings specifically? Shouldn’t be the goal to reduce overall child mortality? In which case it doesn’t make sense to focus on school shootings. They’re a rounding error in child mortality. Compare actual death rates between first-world countries to see what I mean; the US lags behind its Western peers, but the presence of school shootings, which is generally referred to as a decidedly American problem, is not nearly large enough to make an appreciable difference [1]. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/youth-mortality-rate https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/youth-mortality-rate
    • clove 3y ago
      It's about empathy. Publicly stating that you are concerned about children being shot shows empathy and boosts one's image. Publicly stating that you are concerned about child obesity is dangerous because it's implicitly stating that people are raising their children incorrectly and making poor decisions, which is more of an accusatory than empathetical statement. The "think about the children" crowd don't actually want you to think about the children.
• sundvor 3y ago
  If you wonder why the rest of the world looks at USA funny, here's a counter point: There are 9614 schools in Australia, and since 1992 there's been a total of six shootings resulting in a sum of 3 deaths. The deaths were at universities, so strictly speaking no children were lost. There have been no more school shootings since 2012, a year that took no lives. By US standards we could have 3-4 shootings per year and that would be "not regular"? Christ. As a parent in Australia, youth violence with knives as well as distracted drivers concern me. Guns? Not even on my radar. (https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/could-a-mass-shooting-happen-in-an-australian-school/280347 https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/could-a-mass-shoo...)
  • ianai 3y ago
    I would caution you still. Enjoy that you don’t have the blight we have in the US - but also be on guard against any forces towards such politics. It can happen anywhere with the wrong element propping up harmful policies entering the political sphere.
• r00fus 3y ago
  Every single school has an "active shooter" drill. Some boneheaded admins even have a fake instigator come onto campus. It's extremely disruptive to a child's psyche even if they are never unlucky enough to be at one of the weekly school shootings (which is a horrifically dystopic line that I'd never considered possible 20 years ago).
  • ipaddr 3y ago
    Every school should have if I won the lottery drills than because the odds of winning are higher than being killed in a school shooting.
• xeromal 3y ago
  I'm generally in this camp of statistical importance when it comes to things like this, but the US is just about the only country where it happens this much. It shouldn't happen.
• Projectiboga 3y ago
  I bet you remember fire drills as a kid? Now they have those and Active Shooter Drills. It doesn't matter if actual shooting are rare if the fear of them is 'Drilled' into the kid's heads. I saw a paper that tried to measure the impact of first cell phone ownership on teen's mental health. What stood out the most was the whole cohort of teens were at fairly depressed emotional status, the ones impacted by early cell phone ownership even more so. We all here are relatively well educated and by extension fairly well off, we can't imagine what most of the generations following us are going through. I'm gen x so while the economic outlook was beginning to degrade there was still ample opportunity for simple hard work to succeed, that ladder has been pulled up to a large extent. We need a unified progressive taxation system, the current hodgepodge of regressive FICA tax and various credits, cliffs and the slew of tax breaks for investments have worsened class differences.
• jen20 3y ago
  > I certainly wouldn’t call them a “regular feature” More than one a week during the school year definitely makes them a regular feature. I can think of one in my entire lifetime in the UK. Frankly it’s not clear what point you think you’re making, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the one you actually make. A close-to-1%-chance (I didn’t check your math) of experiencing a school shooting is now low, it is ABSURDLY high.