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by zmgsabst 1481 days ago
Mass shootings aren’t common.

Also, most “mass shootings” are by pistol by gangs — you’re citing a statistic on the largest ones, which are rare even among rare events.

Generally, we shouldn’t base policy around outliers of outliers.
2 comments
meheleventyone 1481 days ago
Comedy gold. We shouldn’t base policy around outliers of outliers but we should have a policy of arming the populace in case they need to lead an insurrection which is itself an extreme outlier. Or the chance of needing a gun for self defence which is also quite the outlier particularly if you drill down into the actual risk factors rather than using broad statistics.

So far this year more school kids have died from being shot in the line of duty than cops who are routinely armed. So it doesn’t strike me as that much of an outlier. In particular kids should definitely be safer from gun violence than a police officer. That seems like a reasonable goal?

Or the fact that the incidence of school shootings means kids are more widely impacted than just those who end up on the wrong end of a gun.

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zmgsabst 1481 days ago
> In particular kids should definitely be safer from gun violence than a police officer. That seems like a reasonable goal?

No…? Why would comparing vastly different groups be “reasonable”?

Also, they are on a per capita basis: there’s a lot more school children than police officers.

By about two orders of magnitude (50M children to 600k officers).

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meheleventyone 1479 days ago
So you’re saying it’s perfect reasonable for more kids to be violently shot to death than police? On the whole my expectation is that the officers should be protecting the kids but this attitude certainly explains the behaviour of the officers on the day.
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rswail 1481 days ago
How about basing policy on not getting innocent children and adults mass murdered on a regular basis?

They are outliers of outliers in other countries. In the US, it's once a week.

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zmgsabst 1481 days ago
> mass murdered on a regular basis?

That doesn’t happen — it’s been four years since a similarly deadly shooting.

> They are outliers of outliers in other countries. In the US, it's once a week.

You forgot to exclude gang violence.

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