[crtified]

>It was a good discussion topic about why adults get so bothered by things that look like guns.

I think that's because parent-child is the strongest bond known to humanity, so anything symbolic of (or against) child safety evokes the strongest emotional responses we can ever have.

Guns, when loaded, are one of the extremely few consumer objects capable of being held in a child's hand and, with a physical ease similar to changing TV channel with a remote, destroy or end a life. (and, of course, one of the first rules of guns is "always assume it's loaded")

And so - especially in a country like the USA where guns are a prominent part of culture, and thus talked and thought about a lot - the conflation of the above means that for a significant cohort of parents, guns are one iconic symbol of their ultimate nightmare : losing their child somehow.

The fact that the USA needs separate Wikipedia pages per decade in order to make the summary list of school shootings manageable is illustrative of why some have developed such phobias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_school_shootings_in_t...

[somenameforme]

School shootings are extremely rare and so I was curious how it could be that large. The nuance is that those pages are not just listing school shootings as commonly understood/feared, but any shooting involving a school in any way.

So for instance from the 2010s [1] page you get teacher shooting principle, biology professor (female no less!) shooting other professors, guy killing himself in a university library after firing off a couple of rounds at nobody, 60+ guy shooting his 60+ year old wife in a parking lot then killing self, and so on.

I think that's a bit dodgy, because there's something like 130k+ schools of all sorts in the US [2], so you have a massive multiplier there. To put that number in contrast, there are fewer than 17k Starbucks in the US. Do the same by basically any metric, positive or negative, and you're going to similarly see a huge number of incidents.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

[2] - https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84

[iamnothere]

Many school shootings would also be better classified as “shootings at a school”, such as targeted gang violence or arguments between individuals. This doesn’t excuse these events (kids should be safe at school) but most are not the sort of Columbine-style events evoked by the phrase. Conflating the two likely makes it harder to find a solution, as “ban guns” isn’t on the table without an amendment.

[defrost]

to be fair, other countries also have listed as school shootings any event that involved shooting and a school; eg: Australia with a population ~ 15x smaller than the US:

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

has a total of six (6) incidents this century (since 2000) .. somewhat less than a factor of 15 less than the US for that same 26 year period.

Note that three of the six incidents of the past 26 years involved guns being fired but no one being hit (no grazes, injuries, or deaths).

[somenameforme]

I think the connotation of a school shooting is somebody going to a school and shooting numerous students in a mostly random fashion with the intention of creating terror. That's why guns are so scary in this context - it's trivial to kill a person with a gun, a knife, a car, or a brick, but it's much easier to kill 10 people with a gun than it is with the other instruments - well except perhaps a car.

But when you aren't listing just these sort school shootings, but instead listing any homicide that occurred within the vicinity of a school, why is it reasonable to exclude the various incidents of non-gun homicides at Australian [1][2] (or American for that matter) schools? It just feels like a false narrative. Because what matters if we're just speaking of safety at schools is how often people are killed within the vicinity of schools, though obviously subdata including the share of each weapon in homicides would be useful/informative.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lilie_James

[2] - https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15912963/Father-dies-...

[defrost]

> why is it reasonable to exclude the various incidents of non-gun homicides at Australian schools.

(when " listing any homicide that occurred within the vicinity of a school")

It isn't reasonable, and that is exactly why non shooting homicides are included in lists of all homicides but not included in lists of shooting homicides.

[somenameforme]

Yeah but there the issue of deception by lack of context. Wiki, so far as I can tell, has no comparable page or even information on general homicide at schools, only the gun stuff. Imagine, if somebody started listing all fatal taxi/rideshare incidents with a female driver. There would be a lot incidents, but it'd be completely misleading without the context of how that compares to incidents of all drivers, and so it would serve little purpose other than to implicitly misinform people.

So in the case of schools when there are 130k+ educational institutions in the US basically every single thing that you can imagine happens, and happens a lot. But it says absolutely nothing about the relative frequency of that event, but much more so about the fact that there are a massive amount of schools.

[jason_oster]

> but it's much easier to kill 10 people with a gun than it is with the other instruments - well except perhaps a car.

Or explosives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

[crtified]

We can certainly pick apart any given data point.

It doesn't change the overarching sentiment that guns are a subject that attracts considerably larger attention in the USA than in any other 'developed' nation.

Pick any number of metrics - frequency of incidents, size and power of advocacy groups, political debate, ownership levels, media coverage, constitutional significance - and that pattern is clear.

So my [here refined] point remains : there is no (developed nation) where guns are a greater part of public discourse than the USA. Therefore, when we find ourselves questioning "why are some USA citizens quite passionate about the debate?" (especially where their children are concerned), I don't think we need to look too far for the answer.

That is true for both sides of the debate.

[watwut]

All the dodgy things listed in the second paragraph are solid school shootings?

[amanaplanacanal]

They don't pattern match with what people visualize as school shootings: kids bringing guns to school to shoot other kids.

[watwut]

It is a nitpick, but majority of what you mean was (large ones) were committed by adults.

List by deaths is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

[win311fwg]

Guns have always posed that risk to children. Despite that, the schools, at least around here, used to have shooting ranges and the kids would bring their guns to school to make use of them! Hard to believe now, and as you can image those ranges have been since decommissioned, but nobody batted an eye back in the day.

Key point here is that adults haven't always been bothered by things that look like guns. That is something that has emerged recently. What changed?

[WillAdams]

Moreover, target shooting is the only school sport in the U.S. to have _never_ had an injury recorded as part of the sport itself --- that my local public school has a locker of rifles locked up and un-used in the basement and no longer has a marksmanship program/participates in competitions is _not_ justifiable on the basis of safety.

Further, children who have attended the NRA gun safety course have a much better record of safety and safe interactions with firearms than those who don't --- learning the rules of gun safety and the appropriate thing to do when finding a firearm which is not in the possession of a responsible adult makes for much less tragedy.

What has changed is that it used to be a part of the immigrant experience to purchase firearms and take up hunting, but the transition from rural farm life to urban city life means that an ever larger portion of the U.S. population has limited experience with/knowledge of firearms.

[warumdarum]

I find it fascinating. There are the stabbings in china and car amoks, but everywhere else on the planet such behavior is only found with disenfranchised veterans after a large war has ended.