[zrail]

I agree with you that the state has just as much right to vet teachers as it does gun permit seekers.

It's a massive difference of scale, however. There have been 135 teachers convicted of sexual misconduct in 2022 to date.

https://go2tutors.com/135-teachers-child-sex-crimes/

There have been 246 mass shootings in 2022 to date. More than 18,000 people have died from gun violence. To date. That data is from a month ago. Of course you might say that few of those were directly caused be people with concealed carry permits, but how many of them involved guns stolen from people who legally purchased?

https://www.insider.com/number-of-mass-shootingsin-america-t...

Your entire comparison is facetious. You seek to draw a parallel between educators teaching things you don't like and the deaths of eighteen thousand people. It's dishonest and unworthy of further debate.

[dang]

Your recent comments seem to be using HN for political/ideological battle. That's not in keeping with the intended spirit of the site, so can you please not do that?

It's inevitable and fine to comment occasionally on divisive topics, but the primary use of the site should be for intellectual curiosity. That's a very different thing from battle, and incompatible with it.

Your last paragraph stoops into name-calling and personal attack, which is definitely against the HN guidelines and not cool, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[zrail]

That's fair. My apologies.

[car_analogy]

> There have been 135 teachers convicted of sexual misconduct [..] More than 18,000 people have died from gun violence. To date. [..] you might say that few of those were directly caused be people with concealed carry permits

> It's a massive difference of scale, however.

If we're going to compare scale by looking at all gun homicides, shouldn't we also look at all rape?

There were 14,000 gun homicides in 2018 [1], and 431,000 rapes in 2015 [2]. 15% of rape victims are children (ages 12-17) [3], meaning 64,000 rapes/year of children alone, i.e. 4.6 child rapes for every homicide.

There's also [4], giving it was found that roughly 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a public school employee between 1991 and 2000. That's 29,000/year by public school teachers alone - equivalent to licensed, background-checked gun owners. Though it is not limited to rape, but all "physical sexual abuse".

Granted murder is worse than rape (and even more so for the vague "sexual abuse"), but I think the scale is comparable.

Speaking of scale, the scale of the countermeasure must also be taken into account. There are fewer teachers than gun owners in the US, so a requirement that only affects teachers is less imposing than one that affects all gun owners.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta... - Opening paragraph, deaths minus suicides

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States#Prev... - The 2016 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which measures sexual assaults and rapes that may not have been reported to the police, estimated that there were 431,840 incidents of rape or sexual assault in 2015.

[3] https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_harassment_in_education...