[NoImmatureAdHom]

This is a bit disingenuous I think. I worry people will infer that young children are at risk from random violence. That's not true.

That stat goes from 0-19 years of age, and the vast majority of deaths are in the older segment. Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men as part of organized crime or over matters of honor.

If you're a parent and not participating in that world, you and your children have nothing to fear.

[daedalus_f]

There have been 236 shootings resulting in death or injury in American schools since 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

[NoImmatureAdHom]

It looks like 348 according to that data, resulting in 150 deaths over about 13 years, or 11.5 deaths per year on average.

There are ~74 million people 0-18 years of age in the U.S. right now, meaning about 0.016 deaths per 100,000 children per year.

And these won't be similar across the age spectrum: most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids (either the shooter or the victims), some don't involve any intent to shoot anyone (firing a gun in the air), some involve justified shootings (i.e., in self-defense), and the wikipedia data includes universities so they would fall outside of 0-18. The basic point being the 0.016 number is inflated.

For comparison, drowning is about 1.0 per 100,000 or 64x as likely. Being struck and killed by lightning is about half as likely.

[ClapperHeid]

  >most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids...

The fact that you have enough school shootings, happening over a long enough period, to allow people to formulate stats about what "most" of them involve is in itself an indictment of why your attitude to gun control is so incomprehensible to so many of us outside the US

In almost every other "Western" country, one solitary school shooting... ever... would be a catastrophe etched into the national consciousness. And would almost certainly have resulted in laws being changed to ensure it could never happen again.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

I think you're right about it being a bigger deal elsewhere, and you're right about legislative reactions. I have several thoughts:

1) The U.S. population is really big. 333M or so. New Zealand is 5M? So, inflate the base rate by 66x. When doing "intuitive statistics" about this sort of thing, people think at the country level and don't adjust for population. That will remove some of the effect, but even doing that there's going to be more school shootings in the U.S. per capita, of course.

2) Gun laws don't work. The best available work on this suggests a modest decrease in murder rates at best. People who want to murder will just use alternative means. There are plenty of ways to kill schoolchildren if someone decides to do it. Easy availability of guns probably does increase the rate and deadliness, but not by all that much. Something else is going on in the U.S. Media contagion is part of it, imho.

3) The extent to which people pay attention to astronomically unlikely things like school shootings really doesn't make any sense. As I estimate somewhere else in these comments, the likelihood of a child in the U.S. being shot and killed at school is about double that of being struck and killed by lightning. Though it's a tragic spectacle when it happens, it's not something worth worrying about. The irony is nobody gives a shit about stuff that might actually kill your kids, like drowning, car crashes, etc. People are so, so very nonchalant about things that are actually risky...

[dane-pgp]

> Gun laws don't work. The best available work on this suggests a modest decrease in murder rates at best.

Feel free to share a link to the best available work. Please also read this, though:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-is-cl...

[NoImmatureAdHom]

I appreciate you engaging! Really, I do.

I am sorry to say it, but Scientific American has become politicized trash under current leadership. It pains me because I remember it fondly from my childhood. The article you linked to doesn't even try to meet basic scientific standards.

Here is a good overview: https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/key-findings/what-s...

TL;DR: evidence coming from academia (which is extremely anti-gun) only weakly supports a very small subset of gun laws as working. Taken in the light of publication bias and the file drawer problem, this is a nothing.