[NoImmatureAdHom]

Shootings, especially mass shootings, are a very small problem compared to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, car crashes, and tiktok. If you're taking a vaguely utilitarian approach to public health policy it makes the most sense to do things like try to make Americans less fat, by a wide margin.

[dane-pgp]

> Shootings ... are a very small problem compared to things like ... car crashes, and tiktok.

That's an interesting claim. Perhaps you didn't know that "Firearms now exceed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death for people ages one to 24" according to [1].

I suppose that statistic might include gun suicides and gun accidents, which (under an extremely contrived definition) don't count as "shootings", but that still misses the point that sensible governments have successfully reduced car accident deaths by tightening regulations related to vehicle ownership and licensing, whereas America is notably bad at doing so for guns, and is paying the price for that failure with the blood of its children.

If you could provide a statistic for the number of annual US deaths due to TikTok, I'd be interested to compare that to shooting deaths too.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/guns-now-kill-mor...

[NoImmatureAdHom]

Young people basically just don't die much. Whether something is the leading cause or the 3rd cause is irrelevant. The absolute size of the risk is what's relevant.

Here's an example: Imagine you hear that the U.S. is 43rd in the world on math test scores among highschoolers, and China is 4th. ZOMG, A BIG DEAL!?!? Right? Well, that's what you'll hear in the media anyway.

Now, imagine if I told you that the mean U.S. score was 87, and the mean Chinese score was 89 out of 100. Does it still seem like a big deal?

Here's another point from another comment: 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.

[dane-pgp]

> The absolute size of the risk is what's relevant.

But you weren't talking about the absolute size, you said "a very small problem compared to things like" (my emphasis). Please at least admit you were wrong about that.

In any case, as an absolute number, even one school shooting is too many, and if the US government can devote resources and legislation to reducing traffic accidents and drug overdoses harming children, then there's no reason why it can't do the same to reduce gun deaths, like every other civilized country does.

> Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men

You may be surprised to learn[0] that "Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 ... were among 37% of gun homicides" in 2019, so most killings are not like what you describe at all.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/02/23/young-...

[NoImmatureAdHom]

Haha, you make a bunch of good points. Again, I really appreciate the good-natured engagement.

> The absolute size of the risk is what's relevant.

If you look at the whole sentence "...compared to things like...", I'm talking (or at least meant to be clear about talking) about the risk from shootings in general, not shootings of children in particular or school shootings:

> Shootings, especially mass shootings, are a very small problem compared to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, car crashes, and tiktok. If you're taking a vaguely utilitarian approach to public health policy it makes the most sense to do things like try to make Americans less fat, by a wide margin.

When I say "shootings", I mean the thing people intuitively understand it to be (Person A shoots Person B), and not suicides. If we include suicides, car crashes and "shootings" in the U.S. are ~ the same size. Suicides don't respond much to "no guns" as I recall...you get a couple percent reduction, but people mostly substitute (tall buildings, etc.). I happen to think it's cruel to prevent all suicides, and that some people who want to die should be allowed to do so with dignity, instead of alone and sad, but that's a digression.

Anyway: for adults, the relative risk is important since we're making decisions about allocating public health resources. There are on the order of a few hundred thousand "unscheduled" (preventable) deaths in the U.S. in a given year, and 12,000 gun murders. Get rid of guns, and charitably that number goes from 12,000 murders to 9,600 murders. But you could've saved a lot more lives working on the boring stuff, not to mention the astronomical amount of political capital you burned to get that done.

For kids, the the absolute risk is what's important since they basically don't die. If you're thinking about where to invest resources, invest not in making them die less but rather in making them into better, healthier people. Not to say investment in preventing childhood death should be exactly zero, I'm talking on the margin here (what do we do with the next dollar/minute/effort).

>even one school shooting is too many

...yeah, but it's not! Would you pay $100B to prevent the next one? Could've saved a lot of people from diabetes / heart disease with that money, instead of 8 kids. It's tragic, sure, and we're all tempted to say stuff like that for social reasons, but when you're really deciding how to allocate resources it's so, so rare that hedging doesn't make much sense. Remember, about double the risk of being struck and killed by lightning (a lot more people are struck and survive).

I don't have time right now to go in to the race thing, but I will point out that "Black" is ~14% of the U.S. population. Black people (90% men) commit more than 50% of homicides in the U.S., so they murder at ~7x the rate of non-Black Americans before correcting for things like which crimes get solved (correcting moves it to ~10x, they're better at getting away with murder since organized crime). If you're curious, this is where you should start (the UCR): https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...