Mass Shooting & Gun Violence | Wisconsin school shooting today (4 victims plus shooter dead, more injured)

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Zoo_View said:
Unfortunately, 4 people shot and killed at about 5:30 am.

The alleged shooter is arrested.

Any reason we should talk about this all-too-common occurrence?
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I've taken the subway many times in NYC late at night. I've found it to be safe, or at least safe enough. But then again, I've never fallen asleep on the subway. DO. NOT. SLEEP. ON. THE. SUBWAY.
 
aGDevil2k said:
I hope my kid can survive the next 7.75 years of US schools.
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Statistically speaking they will be just fine. These incidents are high visibility but low frequency events that only impact a fraction of a fraction of a percent of students, thankfully.
 
aGDevil2k said:
I hope my kid can survive the next 7.75 years of US schools.
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It is FAR, FAR more likely your kid will be killed in a car accident than a school shooting. In general, people are very bad at assessing risks.

Now, if you expanded to any firearm death, including suicide, you’d be closer to the mark. But school shootings should be very low on your risk of worries for a soon-to-be teenager.
 
Calheel said:
It is FAR, FAR more likely your kid will be killed in a car accident than a school shooting. In general, people are very bad at assessing risks.
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The mass psychological impacts of a school shooting are greater than the death toll. Guarantee you that nearly every kid (and every parent) in a school where one of these shootings takes place has greater trauma from the events than if one of their classmates had been killed in a car wreck.

It’s dumb to try to minimize the preventable damage caused by these incidents by comparing them to car accidents or any other form of tragedy. This is a uniquely traumatic and modern phenomenon that occurs with far greater frequency in the US than in all other countries combined. US citizens are justified in their fears.
 
Calheel said:
It is FAR, FAR more likely your kid will be killed in a car accident than a school shooting. In general, people are very bad at assessing risks.

Now, if you expanded to any firearm death, including suicide, you’d be closer to the mark. But school shootings should be very low on your risk of worries for a soon-to-be teenager.
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These type comparisons are just asinine. For a multitude of reasons.

Not the least of which is if your kid is going to die at school, it’s far more likely due to a shooting incident than it is a car driving though the hallways or a meteor dropping from the sky. The guns, the one thing our society can control. Literally. The non regulated militia. That’s the issue.
 
EyeballKid said:
The mass psychological impacts of a school shooting are greater than the death toll. Guarantee you that nearly every kid (and every parent) in a school where one of these shootings takes place has greater trauma from the events than if one of their classmates had been killed in a car wreck.

It’s dumb to try to minimize the preventable damage caused by these incidents by comparing them to car accidents or any other form of tragedy. This is a uniquely traumatic and modern phenomenon that occurs with far greater frequency in the US than in all other countries combined.
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While this is true, attitudes like “I hope my kids survive school” are not helpful as they dramatically overstate the risks involved, potentially at the expense of causing much more common threats to be ignored. Yes, school shootings are a problem. But they are a problem that 99.99% of kids are never going to experience.
 
2ManyBlueCups said:
What laws would have prevented this shooting? We don’t know anything about it yet.
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Totally fair and valid point. That was a knee jerk, emotional post on my part. I just always have such a visceral reaction to this stuff. But you are definitely right- we don’t know anything about the shooting yet, and certainly not enough for people like me to start talking about which gun laws should be reformed.
 
CFordUNC said:
Totally fair and valid point. That was a knee jerk, emotional post on my part. I just always have such a visceral reaction to this stuff. But you are definitely right- we don’t know anything about the shooting yet, and certainly not enough for people like me to start talking about which gun laws should be reformed.
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I get it, and I don’t blame you. This stuff sucks.
 
Awinisawin said:
These type comparisons are just asinine. For a multitude of reasons.

Not the least of which is if your kid is going to die at school, it’s far more likely due to a shooting incident than it is a car driving though the hallways or a meteor dropping from the sky. The guns, the one thing our society can control. Literally. The non regulated militia. That’s the issue.
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I disagree.

There has been a ton of research about how people misapprehend risk based on media coverage. Sensational acts with a lot of deaths get a ton of media coverage. As a result, people fear and worry about these events disproportionately.

Limiting your analysis to how your child will die in school is silly. The odds of your child dying in school are astronomically low.

Of course, humans are not computers. All parents have concerns about school safety. But in terms of risk assessment, there is almost no place safer for your kid than a school (setting aside emotional damage).
 
Calheel said:
It is FAR, FAR more likely your kid will be killed in a car accident than a school shooting. In general, people are very bad at assessing risks.

Now, if you expanded to any firearm death, including suicide, you’d be closer to the mark. But school shootings should be very low on your risk of worries for a soon-to-be teenager.
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I think we all know that the likelihood of a school shooting happening at a particular school is very small. What sucks is that the possibility of it happening is even our radar. And it’s not like it’s a far-fetched possibility; it’s a realistic possibility. It also sucks that we hear about several of these each year.

When Columbine happened we were shocked as a nation. It was amost impossible to fathom. It shook us for weeks, if not months. Now we hear about these on what seems to be a regular basis. It doesn’t shock us like it once did. It doesn’t have us shaken for extended periods of time. We quickly forget about it.

But I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t think telling the parents of kids who are killed in school shootings that their kids were part of an extremely small statistical category will provide those parents any comfort. Nor will it comfort the kids who witnessed such things.
 
2ManyBlueCups said:
What laws would have prevented this shooting? We don’t know anything about it yet.
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I think many here see the utility in laws that, while not preventing every single shooting, would prevent some and lower the overall risk, especially over time. Someone shooting up a school with a 12-gauge or a pistol or a pocket knife is objectively less likely to result in mass death than high-capacity AR-type rifles. It's cliched now, sadly, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
 
2ManyBlueCups said:
While this is true, attitudes like “I hope my kids survive school” are not helpful as they dramatically overstate the risks involved, potentially at the expense of causing much more common threats to be ignored. Yes, school shootings are a problem. But they are a problem that 99.99% of kids are never going to experience.
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2ManyBlueCups said:
While this is true, attitudes like “I hope my kids survive school” are not helpful as they dramatically overstate the risks involved, potentially at the expense of causing much more common threats to be ignored. Yes, school shootings are a problem. But they are a problem that 99.99% of kids are never going to experience.
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Something like 350k or 400k students have been directly affected by gun violence in schools since Columbine. Let’s take the middle ground and say 375k.

That means these were kids who were in school when a shooting took place.

Now let’s multiply that by 4 or 5, to account for parents and siblings of those kids.

So we’re looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 2+ million people who likely have psychological trauma from gun violence in schools over 25 years.

This doesn’t count teachers or administrators, or their families. It doesn’t count grandparents, extended family, or friends who may not go to the same school.

If we were to account for all the people who’ve been affected by gun violence in school, it’d be much more than .01% of the US population.
 
Icky Mettle said:
I think we all know that the likelihood of a school shooting happening at a particular school is very small. What sucks is that the possibility of it happening is even our radar. And it’s not like it’s a far-fetched possibility; it’s a realistic possibility. It also sucks that we hear about several of these each year.

When Columbine happened we were shocked as a nation. It was amost impossible to fathom. It shook us for weeks, if not months. Now we hear about these on what seems to be a regular basis. It doesn’t shock us like it once did. It doesn’t have us shaken for extended periods of time. We quickly forget about it.

But I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t think telling the parents of kids who are killed in school shootings that their kids were part of an extremely small statistical category will provide those parents any comfort. Nor will it comfort the kids who witnessed such things.
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Right.

I would never say that to the parent of a kid killed in a school shooting. I’m not a monster. But I will say it to this board and maybe it will relieve some unnecessary anxiety.

And you have an odd interpretation of the word “realistic”. There are roughly 100,000 schools in America. There are maybe 20 school shootings a year. That means your child has roughly 1 in 5,000 chance of being in a school shooting each year. And of course the chance of actually dying in a school shooting is astronomically low. There are 50 million school students in the US. And roughly 20 school homicides a year. So it is hard to see how that is “realistic” in probability terms.
 
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EyeballKid said:
Something like 350k or 400k students have been directly affected by gun violence in schools since Columbine. Let’s take the middle ground and say 375k.

That means these were kids who were in school when a shooting took place.

Now let’s multiply that by 4 or 5, to account for parents and siblings of those kids.

So we’re looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 2+ million people who likely have psychological trauma from gun violence in schools over 25 years.

This doesn’t count teachers or administrators, or their families. It doesn’t count grandparents, extended family, or friends who may not go to the same school.

If we were to account for all the people who’ve been affected by gun violence in school, it’d be much more than .01% of the US population.
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A couple of problems with these statistics. For starters, “gun violence” is different than a school shooting. The vast majority of gun violence impacting school-age children does not occur at school. The assumption is also made in these statistics that if one person at a school is impacted by gun violence, then everyone is. That’s not particularly realistic. If my high school has 2,000 people in it and some guy I have seen once in my life gets arrested because he shot someone in a gang beer at 2am over the summer, that’s not really going to affect people the same way an event like today would.
 
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