[SlowRobotAhead]

>And what makes you so sure that the BBC's handling of those stories isn't the correct one? Your personal bias, of course.

Well, actual verified accounts and statistics for one. BBC loves nothing more than highlighting USA shootings - despite near historic record lows of gun violence and definitely lows of gun ownership to crime ratios.

BBC does this because they want to “prove” how much better they are not being allowed the choice of how to defend yourself. It’s British smugness 101.

Btw... Did you see the school shooting last week where the aggresor was wearing a smash the patriarchy shirt - no you probably did not, and definitely didn’t see it on BBC.

Narrative and Bias. BBC can be trusted at all on firearms anywhere.

[Tomte]

In my country all school and mass shootings that have occurred have been top news for days, if not weeks.

Now look at this list of only school shootings in America and tell me again that the BBC is unfairly reporting on too many of them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_...

What percentage have they reported on, anyway? Low single digit?

Your "near historic record lows" are how many orders of magnitude more than in other countries?

[SlowRobotAhead]

That list of school shootings includes someone firing a gun near a school, and someone shooting a cat a 3am, as well as an officer discharging his gun negligently. Nice list, not hyperbolic at all.

You’ll be happy to know there are less school shootings today than the 90s. [0]

As opposed to other countries, where guns are available they are used... shocker! The fact is that where guns are in the USA, our rural areas have violence rates as near European rural rates. We have a lot of metropolitan areas with populations of 250k+ where our crime is, those are areas with illegal guns, that go with the drug, gang, poverty, inequality of social mobility, and gang problems. We have issues in the cities - but it’s not because of guns. That violence committed with guns is falling, despite record gun availability. The CDC found that where we have 10k homicides including all the drug and gang violence per year, we have 500,000 to 3,000,000 successful and legal defensive gun uses. And... to wrap up the “but other countries” argument, I don’t care what other countries to, in the USA we have a fundemental freedom to defend ourselves with the lost effective means of personal protection ever invented, it’s a natural right enumerated as a civil right.

[0] https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-o...

[OJFord]

> That list of school shootings includes someone firing a gun near a school, and someone shooting a cat a 3am, as well as an officer discharging his gun negligently. Nice list, not hyperbolic at all.

All of those things would make national news if they occurred in the UK.

[SlowRobotAhead]

Cool story! When we're talking about UK that will be worth bringing up.

In the UK you go to jail for defending yourself [0,1,2]. The UK police themselves tell you the only legal tool for self-defense is a rape alarm [3].

If you think it's good the UK government has made the choice for people on how best to defend themselves, that's cool. I understand how if you've grown up with that culture, it's probably difficult to understand the freedom of choice we have in the USA.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1461346/Five-years-i...

[1] https://metro.co.uk/2017/12/11/pensioner-jailed-shooting-bur...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-43639183

[3] https://www.askthe.police.uk/content/Q589.htm

[OJFord]

You're making it out to be irrelevant, but the context here is why it might be given 'disproportionate' (through an American lens) coverage on the website of the British Broadcasting Company.

[moorhosj]

You make a quick slight-of-hand in this comment. You start off talking about how gun violence, as a whole, is at low historic levels. Then, you go on to talk specifically about school shootings. As far as I can tell, school shootings are at historically high levels.

It seems legitimate to report on that considering schools are places that parents send their kids every day and have historically viewed them as safe. Add that most schools are publicly-run institutions and you have an interesting story of children shooting children at government run locations. If that doesn’t seem newsworthy to you, the bias may be in your own interpretation.

[SlowRobotAhead]

>As far as I can tell, school shootings are at historically high levels.

And you are also wrong about that. [0] My comment wasn’t about number of school shooting - but narrative. You don’t hear about them unless they fall into a given narrative. You don’t question what you are seeing at all, just happily accept it because it fits your bias.

[0] https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-o...

[moorhosj]

Ah yes, more slight of hand. In this instance, you have moved the goalposts to "mass" school shootings, only counting instances where 4 or more people were killed/injured. This list also doesn't seem to include shootings that took place at colleges, which are also schools (Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois and Umpqua come to mind). It almost like you don't question your source at all and just happily accepted it because it fits your bias.

Even if we just focus on K-12, you could download this [1] data from US Naval Postgraduate School and run a trend line all the way back to 1970.

[1] https://www.chds.us/ssdb/number-killed-by-year/

[SlowRobotAhead]

Yes, perhaps the study I linked to that from Northwestern using FBI Unified crime report sources, and a published data set you can examine - is biased and wrong.

While your source that has no data at all - that does seem more trust worthy. Not to mention rate vs incidents.

[moorhosj]

Your source was a news article from Northeastern, not Northwestern, about a study. That said, the study's data source is cited in the article as: "Fridel and Fox used data collected by USA Today, the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, Congressional Research Service, Gun Violence Archive, Stanford Geospatial Center and Stanford Libraries, Mother Jones, Everytown for Gun Safety, and a NYPD report on active shooters."

The source I provided is literally only data, with no editorializing. It comes from this source: "The School Shooting Database Project is conducted as part of the Advanced Thinking in Homeland Security (HSx) program at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS)."[1] It also has a publicized data set you can examine.[2]

You are not biased at all, but anyone who dares disagree with you must be.

[1] https://www.chds.us/ssdb/about/

[2] https://www.chds.us/ssdb/dataset/

[hanging]

Another view on their methodology:

"The (K12SSD) table at right shows that the majority of “school shootings” over the last 48 years occur outside while on school campus. When tied in with non-shooting “school shooting” definitions, such as brandishing, we get a very different picture. By this project’s definitions, if someone on the sidewalk outside the school brandished a gun, that was a “school shooting”. Three percent of “school shootings” in the database involve no shots being fired at all. And if we include single shots (regardless of from where they came, or if they were suicides, or if they were late at night, etc.) those add up to 63% of all incidents."

http://www.gunfacts.info/blog/school-shooting-database-and-p...

I hardly think K12SSD's releases come "with no editorializing".