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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 absolut

by 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.
  - escapedmoose 3y ago
    What’s the actual K-12 chance though? If you’re saying that the cumulative 0.7% chance is incorrect, can you provide a more accurate figure?
    - NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
      # K-12 kids killed (specifically in this case shot dead) at school in the U.S. in a given year / # K-12 kids total who go to school This: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/demo/school-enrollment/2020-cps.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/demo/school-enrollme... Makes it look like there are 55,548,000 K-12 kids enrolled in school in the U.S. in 2020 This: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01 https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01 Makes it look like there are between 12 and 35 homicides of kids 5-18 years of age at school per year in the years 1992-2019. The average of 12 and 35 is 23.5, call it 24 kids on average murdered at school per year in the United States in recent years. Note that this is not quite correct because it includes murders other than shootings, so it's a little inflated. But anyway. Also note they say, "“At school” includes on the property of a functioning elementary or secondary school, on the way to or from regular sessions at school, and while attending or traveling to or from a school-sponsored event. In this indicator, the term “at school” is comparable in meaning to the term “school-associated." So again, it's going to be a little inflated because a bunch of these are going to be murders that people wouldn't intuitively understand to be a school shooting (e.g., kid murdered on the way to school in gang crossfire). Okay, so 24 / 55,548,000 = 0.000043% chance per year of dying in a school shooting for a given U.S. child who attends school, all else being equal. And of course, all else isn't equal. School shootings aren't random, and are much more common in the types of environments other shootings are common (poor cities, high % black populations, gangs, etc.). For context, about 520 kids 5-19 die via drowning in the U.S. per year, making it about 22x the risk of being killed at school, all else being equal. (https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/explore-data/explore/selected-years https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/explore-data/explore/selected-y... for death by drowning) Edit: this data makes it seem like 11.5 or so deaths per year rather than 24 (because it's shootings specifically, I think), and gives more colour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
- hobo_in_library 3y ago
  If 0.7% is accurate, then your kid's chances of dying in a car crash for any given year (1 in 93 = 1.07% [1]) is less than your chance of being in a school shooting during your entire childhood! But the cultural framing (or lack thereof) makes the risk of driving in a car _feel_ like it's completely different [1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
  - meowtimemania 3y ago
    no way does 1 in 93 kids die in a car crash for any given year
    - hobo_in_library 3y ago
      Double checking the link, those are lifetime percentages, not annual. Mea culpa
- galdosdi 3y ago
  Mental health problems are a far greater threat though, and have dramatically increased in the last decade, perhaps partly because it's so easy to worry about big problems outside of their control. The probability of being affected by suicide is significantly more than being of being shot in a school shooting. We can do two things at once. We can both, within our control, advocate for making school shootings less common, making climate change less problematic, etc, etc, while also try to actually worry about these things less, and not spread a culture of constant fear and disempowerment. Research who makes sense to vote for, what letters to write to lawmakers, and do that. Then, with the rest of your 364 days of the year, relax and focus on what you can control and having a good time.
  - kredd 3y ago
    Agreed in spirit, but fortunately school shootings isn’t a problem in the country I reside. Mental health though is definitely a huge issue though, but I’m not sure how we can fix that. Remembering myself as a teen, anything that was told to be “bad at that age” was a call for experimentation.
jmathai 3y ago
Yeah - I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. A .7% chance of being at a school with a mass shooting is unfathomable. It's so high.
- srackey 3y ago
  Far higher chance you’ll die on the way to school in a car accident. School shootings are to the left what terrorist attacks are to the right —- fear-mongering over an ultimately rare and insignificant problem to drive desired policy change.
  - gsinclair 3y ago
    Insane. School shootings are genuinely frightful, not the subject of artificial fear-mongering. This shallow and ideological analysis represents such a callous disregard for the trauma that any child would experience is they had to go through that.
    - unmole 3y ago
      > School shootings are genuinely frightful, not the subject of artificial fear-mongering. Terrorist attacks are genuinely terrifying. That doesn't mean the probability of experiencing one isn't vanishingly small.
  - nmfisher 3y ago
    My biggest fear is my kids dying in a car accident. I'd really prefer not to have to worry about school shootings on top of that, even if they are less likely.
anigbrowl 3y ago
because the media has shown them school shootings, and has told them to be anxious about them What argument are you making, that news outlets should not report this? I don't think much coaching is required for people to feel anxious about the idea getting shot by a homicidal maniac, even if the probability of a homicidal maniac showing up is relatively low. Applying your logic, we should avoid having reports or drills about it, and any additional loss of life from lack of preparedness should be offset against the aggregate increased happiness of prior obliviousness to the risk. There are many causes of death which children are not scared of, despite them being far more likely to occur than school shootings. Homicide infants and grade-school kids is disturbingly high up the list, although that includes domestic violence and other causes rather than only school shootings. But there is a high qualitative difference between dying because you did something stupid or because you are the unfortunate victim of disease or an inherited medical condition, vs someone actively trying to kill you.
- hparadiz 3y ago
  Reporting about it in media causes more of them actually so yea. They should stop reporting on them. Our states are as big as countries so they really should be considered separately. Just because Texas had one doesn't mean a child in California is suddenly in more danger. But actually reporting on it in news media does increase the likelihood because it puts the idea into a shooter's head. To put it another way the school district I grew up in has never had a mass shooting. Is a child in that school district actually a 0.7% risk? Statistics can be skewed in any direction.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    Reporting about it in media causes more of them actually so yea. There isn't good evidence to support this claim, though it's popular with people who have never thought about such issues before.
    - hparadiz 3y ago
      https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117259 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
camillomiller 3y ago
Ok, I thought you were just too blindly nerdy about statistics, now I believe you’re an actually horrible person

by lumb63 3y ago

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.
- escapedmoose 3y ago
  What’s the actual K-12 chance though? If you’re saying that the cumulative 0.7% chance is incorrect, can you provide a more accurate figure?
  - NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
    # K-12 kids killed (specifically in this case shot dead) at school in the U.S. in a given year / # K-12 kids total who go to school This: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/demo/school-enrollment/2020-cps.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/demo/school-enrollme... Makes it look like there are 55,548,000 K-12 kids enrolled in school in the U.S. in 2020 This: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01 https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01 Makes it look like there are between 12 and 35 homicides of kids 5-18 years of age at school per year in the years 1992-2019. The average of 12 and 35 is 23.5, call it 24 kids on average murdered at school per year in the United States in recent years. Note that this is not quite correct because it includes murders other than shootings, so it's a little inflated. But anyway. Also note they say, "“At school” includes on the property of a functioning elementary or secondary school, on the way to or from regular sessions at school, and while attending or traveling to or from a school-sponsored event. In this indicator, the term “at school” is comparable in meaning to the term “school-associated." So again, it's going to be a little inflated because a bunch of these are going to be murders that people wouldn't intuitively understand to be a school shooting (e.g., kid murdered on the way to school in gang crossfire). Okay, so 24 / 55,548,000 = 0.000043% chance per year of dying in a school shooting for a given U.S. child who attends school, all else being equal. And of course, all else isn't equal. School shootings aren't random, and are much more common in the types of environments other shootings are common (poor cities, high % black populations, gangs, etc.). For context, about 520 kids 5-19 die via drowning in the U.S. per year, making it about 22x the risk of being killed at school, all else being equal. (https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/explore-data/explore/selected-years https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/explore-data/explore/selected-y... for death by drowning) Edit: this data makes it seem like 11.5 or so deaths per year rather than 24 (because it's shootings specifically, I think), and gives more colour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
hobo_in_library 3y ago
If 0.7% is accurate, then your kid's chances of dying in a car crash for any given year (1 in 93 = 1.07% [1]) is less than your chance of being in a school shooting during your entire childhood! But the cultural framing (or lack thereof) makes the risk of driving in a car _feel_ like it's completely different [1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
- meowtimemania 3y ago
  no way does 1 in 93 kids die in a car crash for any given year
  - hobo_in_library 3y ago
    Double checking the link, those are lifetime percentages, not annual. Mea culpa
galdosdi 3y ago
Mental health problems are a far greater threat though, and have dramatically increased in the last decade, perhaps partly because it's so easy to worry about big problems outside of their control. The probability of being affected by suicide is significantly more than being of being shot in a school shooting. We can do two things at once. We can both, within our control, advocate for making school shootings less common, making climate change less problematic, etc, etc, while also try to actually worry about these things less, and not spread a culture of constant fear and disempowerment. Research who makes sense to vote for, what letters to write to lawmakers, and do that. Then, with the rest of your 364 days of the year, relax and focus on what you can control and having a good time.
- kredd 3y ago
  Agreed in spirit, but fortunately school shootings isn’t a problem in the country I reside. Mental health though is definitely a huge issue though, but I’m not sure how we can fix that. Remembering myself as a teen, anything that was told to be “bad at that age” was a call for experimentation.

jmathai 3y ago

Yeah - I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. A .7% chance of being at a school with a mass shooting is unfathomable. It's so high.

srackey 3y ago
Far higher chance you’ll die on the way to school in a car accident. School shootings are to the left what terrorist attacks are to the right —- fear-mongering over an ultimately rare and insignificant problem to drive desired policy change.
- gsinclair 3y ago
  Insane. School shootings are genuinely frightful, not the subject of artificial fear-mongering. This shallow and ideological analysis represents such a callous disregard for the trauma that any child would experience is they had to go through that.
  - unmole 3y ago
    > School shootings are genuinely frightful, not the subject of artificial fear-mongering. Terrorist attacks are genuinely terrifying. That doesn't mean the probability of experiencing one isn't vanishingly small.
- nmfisher 3y ago
  My biggest fear is my kids dying in a car accident. I'd really prefer not to have to worry about school shootings on top of that, even if they are less likely.

anigbrowl 3y ago

because the media has shown them school shootings, and has told them to be anxious about them What argument are you making, that news outlets should not report this? I don't think much coaching is required for people to feel anxious about the idea getting shot by a homicidal maniac, even if the probability of a homicidal maniac showing up is relatively low. Applying your logic, we should avoid having reports or drills about it, and any additional loss of life from lack of preparedness should be offset against the aggregate increased happiness of prior obliviousness to the risk. There are many causes of death which children are not scared of, despite them being far more likely to occur than school shootings. Homicide infants and grade-school kids is disturbingly high up the list, although that includes domestic violence and other causes rather than only school shootings. But there is a high qualitative difference between dying because you did something stupid or because you are the unfortunate victim of disease or an inherited medical condition, vs someone actively trying to kill you.

hparadiz 3y ago
Reporting about it in media causes more of them actually so yea. They should stop reporting on them. Our states are as big as countries so they really should be considered separately. Just because Texas had one doesn't mean a child in California is suddenly in more danger. But actually reporting on it in news media does increase the likelihood because it puts the idea into a shooter's head. To put it another way the school district I grew up in has never had a mass shooting. Is a child in that school district actually a 0.7% risk? Statistics can be skewed in any direction.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Reporting about it in media causes more of them actually so yea. There isn't good evidence to support this claim, though it's popular with people who have never thought about such issues before.
  - hparadiz 3y ago
    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117259 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

camillomiller 3y ago

Ok, I thought you were just too blindly nerdy about statistics, now I believe you’re an actually horrible person