[la6472]

Right now it is hard to look at our kids faces and not feel the impact of this tragedy. I don’t know about everyone but for most people their kids lives are way more important than their right to bear military grade guns. If there is no perfect solution we have to live with a less than perfect solution. If the solution is to legally make it harder for people to access such guns then so be it.

[cypress66]

As tragic as these events may be, the probability of your kids dying to a school shooting is still incredibly low, and a few orders of magnitude less than car accidents.

Doing some quick math, it seems like it's around 100 to 1000 times more likely that some kid dies to some accident than a mass shooting. But people don't seem to worry 1000 times more about these accidents than school shootings. And it would actually be much easier to reduce the accident number than the shooting number.

[MrMoenty]

Perhaps this is approximately true if you focus exclusively on mass shootings at schools. But shootings overall are one of the leading causes of deaths for children in the US.

See for instance the CDC's visualizations on causes of death per age group [1]. In 2020, 476 children aged 10-14 died in traffic accidents involving motor vehicles. 218 children aged 10-14 were killed in homicides by firearms.

Those two numbers are very much in the same order of magnitude. This is also the case in prior, non-Covid years.

[1] https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/home

[throwntoday]

Any stats on legal vs illegal guns killing children?

Curious as to whether criminals being unable to purchase firearms legally has done anything to stop them from getting ahold of firearms and committing shootings.

[dublidu]

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/22/1094364930/firearms-leading-c... Actually kids are more likely to die from guns than car accidents in America

[cypress66]

I was referring exclusively to school mass shootings.

[dncornholio]

> the probability of your kids dying to a school shooting is still incredibly low

It's only about 50000% higher than in any other place of the world. Is this what you say to you children? That they don't get to get unlucky????????

School should be one of the safest places of the world. People are discussing what COVID will do to the future of their kids. I wonder what living in fear will do instead, which has a much much much bigger impact than 2 years of missed school.

[rswail]

On that reasoning, all of the "lockdowns" and "active shooter drills" and all the other bullshit that the US makes its children undertake in school are a complete waste of time.

Are you seriously trying to argue that school shootings don't happen often enough to try to stop them? Or that society can't do two things (reduce accidental deaths and reduce mass murder) at the same time?

The rationalization of an insane gun culture is incessant and foolish. Guns are a tool and the bullshit that somehow the civilian population would "defend" itself against military coups by the US military, or even more ridiculous, against invasion, is an excuse to allow the ongoing fetish of guns.

For 99.99% of the population, guns are dangerous to have, not because someone might attack you, but because guns are dangerous to have in the home. They are misused, mistakenly left unsecured, and accessed by people (children, those with mental illness) that shouldn't.

Hell, you can't even agree on background checks because of some stupidity regarding having a "register" in case the "government" comes after your weapons.

The US is an empire in decline, and your internal division around this "culture" is a large part of the dis/mis-information exercise that has infected the body politic.

The NRA is a lobby group for gun manufacturers that has bought numerous politicians, while lying to its members about its purpose. The fact that so many actually believe the bullshit is a prime example of dis/mis-information.

[makomk]

From what I can tell, Americans that are opposed to gun restrictions generally also think that "active shooter drills" are indeed a waste of time that just traumatize children for no real benefit other than the political gain of people that want to ban guns. So you're probably pushing against an open door with that argument.

[pjc50]

Worth looking at the NRA's ties to Russian agent, Maria Butina, and this weird little trip to Russia in 2015: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nra-2015-moscow-trip-wasnt-o...

The NRA are incredibly divisive, and it looks like help was offered to keep them doing that.

> The rationalization of an insane gun culture is incessant and foolish. Guns are a tool and the bullshit that somehow the civilian population would "defend" itself against military coups by the US military, or even more ridiculous, against invasion, is an excuse to allow the ongoing fetish of guns.

This - the politics of guns and political violence in the US - is arguably a bigger factor than the guns themselves. The gun does not carry out a mass shooting by itself. And very few mass shooters decide purely on their own to do it; there's a radicalization pipeline. That is why the US has a higher mass shooting rate than other countries with lots of guns.

[la6472]

There has been a 13.5 percent increase in children mortality due to firearms between 2019 and 2020.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761

[lliamander]

There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year. Many just involve presenting or brandishing the gun without having to use it.

Could you look someone in the face who has used a gun to protect themselves or their family and tell them they will need to give up that gun for "public safety"?

[rswail]

Absolutely. Nowhere else in the civilized world do people rely on having a gun to "protect themselves or their family".

Perhaps you need to look at why, in your society, there are so many "opportunities" for "defensive gun uses".

[lliamander]

> Absolutely. Nowhere else in the civilized world do people rely on having a gun to "protect themselves or their family"

Of course you cannot rely on something you are not allowed to have in the first place. Those individuals are still vulnerable if they were presented with an imminent deadly force threat.

> Perhaps you need to look at why, in your society, there are so many "opportunities" for "defensive gun uses".

Of course! that's a very interesting subject in itself. The widespread ownership of guns is not itself the cause.