this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
75 points (91.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43889 readers
772 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No matter how you define "school shooting", they are rare. The total number of people killed in all shootings that occurred on school properties in 2022 was 40 people, over a total of 51 incidents (that number, BTW, includes suicides). This is in a country over 98,000 public schools (that does not include private schools), and 56M K-12 students.
Any way you want to look at it, that's rare. It's far more common than any other (western, 1st world) country, but it's still objectively a very, very rare occurrence; the odds of any single student dying in a school shooting--including suicides at school--in a single school year are under one in a million.
Once you start removing suicides, parents shooting each other in school parking lots over football games, and other similar incidents, and look only at mass-casualty events--where a person intentionally targeted students at a school in order to murder as many people as they could--your numbers go down even more.
I didn't say that at all. I said that there were things on that list that do not fit the commonly-accepted definitions of "school shooting". When you say "school shooting", people hear Uvalde, or Newport. They don't think, "a bullet went through a school wall at 3am on a Saturday morning when no one was in class", or, "a cop shot himself in the leg" despite those being included on the list of "school shootings".
Because I don't have the FBI report on mass casualty events at schools in front of me. But here's one, I'd suggest giving it a read. The things that motivate mass shooters can't be directly addressed by the kinds of things that are going to reduce ordinary violent crime; you need different approaches.
So no, you aren't engaging in good faith argument. You've already reached a conclusion.