I grew up in approximately the same period and grim possibilities, along with local economic problems to a lesser extent, were certainly a concern for me and my peers. Other risks existed as well, kids in my neighborhood school died of drug overdoses, accidents, and medical problems. Others had to deal with poverty, abusive parents, or a family member behind bars. Back then middle aged people blamed television your any despondency among youth. I imagine previous generations blamed radio and newspapers.
The only way these mild horrors get into children heads is, again, through social media.
School shootings are such a regular feature of American life that every school holds safety drills for the risk. I don't think all children get to enjoy the same sort of carefree bubble that you did. Media certainly amplifies the awareness of problems but many kids are far better informed than many adults admit, or want to be themselves.
> School shootings are such a regular feature of American life […] Media certainly amplifies the awareness of problems
Case in point: in 2022 there were 51 school shootings [1]. Certainly more than I’d like there to be, but in a nation with about 129,000 schools [2], I certainly wouldn’t call them a “regular feature”. If students are in school for 18 years, let’s say, to include pre-K, Kindergarten, and an undergrad degree, and the number of school shootings stayed steady for that whole time, they’d be in school for 918 school shootings, or a 0.7% chance that they go to a school which experiences a school shooting. Not common.
Yet the media reports them heavily, and that causes fear, and that fear is what drives schools to hold safety drills regularly to prepare students for these situations.
People are getting confused by the number posted which is badly distorting the discussion. 51 is NOT the number of intentional massacres of students or staff. It is the number of shootings on school grounds of all types _including accidents_.
Here is a real example from the list: "A student was shot and injured when a sheriff’s deputy’s gun accidentally discharged in a classroom during a law enforcement vocational training."
Another: "A male student shot and injured an 18-year-old student. Police say the shooting appeared to have resulted from a dispute between the students."
Read down the list and most are accidents, or take place outside the school (e.g. in parking lots) between 2-3 people. These are accidents and individual beefs between students. They have nothing to do with mass murder. They don't involve anyone outside the students concerned. You could be a student at a school during one of these "school shootings" and not even be aware of it.
It's why the _total_ number of deaths is only 40 (!) from those 51 shootings. 8 of those were teachers so the total number of student deaths was only 32.
"School shootings" in the sense of intentional mass murders are nearly nonexistent. The overwhelming majority of damage related to these events is caused by the media and institutions irresponsibly generating fear that creates real psychological problems and distorts decision-making. The fact that so many here on all sides seem to think that intentional massacres could possibly be happening on a weekly basis in America is a testament to the distortionary power of the media. The reality is simply nothing like that.
The fact that so many here on all sides seem to think that intentional massacres could possibly be happening on a weekly basis in America is a testament to the distortionary power of the media
Nobody is making that argument or getting confused by these numbers. The Edweek figures were linked by someone complaining about media influence.
"School shootings" in the sense of intentional mass murders are nearly nonexistent.
There are only a few such incidents each year but that is far from 'nearly nonexistent'. Perhaps you'd care to quantify what you consider to be the acceptable number of deaths from shooting sprees?
Every year in America 900 kids age 0-19 die from drowning.
3,058 teenagers ages 13-19 die in motor vehicle crashes. [0]
In a country of 332,000,000 people, if 32 deaths stemming from parking lot arguments seems to require a society-wide blanket of fear and dramatic political anger, you are just badly miscalibrated. You're thinking like it's a village, which is natural, but if you want to discuss broad issues at scale, you need to put on your adult-style numerical/comparative thinking hat. "One is too many" sloganeering is simply a path to stupidity at scale. It distracts badly from things that actually matter and we end up way worse off in every respect.
Also worth noting that based on these data it is more or less completely true that a random student doesn't need to worry about school shootings for their own personal safety at all. If you don't choose to get involved in armed parking lot arguments over girls or respect or drugs, you'll be fine. (However, please wear your seatbelt and choose your driver carefully!)
But in other developed countries, kids still die from car crashes and swimming pools. It’s less of a “one is too many” argument for me and more a question of “if everyone else is able to get this right, how the hell are we getting it so wrong?” Looking around the world really drives the point home that these are avoidable fatalities.
That's a great argument for policymaking, but that's not what we're talking about -- we're talking about whether the children themselves should be worried sick, literally, about it. They clearly should not. Obesity and car wrecks will kill far more of them, and dealing with those issues is far more preventable. Smash the soda vending machines in their lunchrooms, and you'll save far more lives, plus avoid traumatizing the vast majority needlessly.
Once again, there is a significant qualitative difference between accidental or medically-related deaths, and someone actively attempting to end your life. Failing to acknowledge this is a significantly larger cognitive blind spot than the frequentist posters above are complaining about.
It's not like there is a complete lack of advocacy about auto safety or school diets. You might remember that during the Obama administration there was a campaign for more healthy school lunches, preferring vegetables and fruits over salty/sugary snacks, and extolling the value of exercise.
My original comment mentioned school shootings as an example of an issue that teens are understandably concerned about, because while the probability is low it's also a fundamentally horrific situation. I'm rather surprised by the rhetorical contortions so many people are putting themselves through to argue that having several massacres a year just in schools is nothing to worry about.
It's something that something should be done about, but not something that should be worried about. There is a fine distinction. Take whatever action is in your control to make the situation better, then, having done that, do not keep ruminating on it pointlessly when it's just not very likely to happen to you.
Stop lumping people who don't want to fret about it in with people who actually think the gun status quo is OK. Of course it's not OK, and should change. That doesn't mean we need to obsess over it. It just happens to be an issue that is very effective at driving media engagement.
By all means, vote and write to your lawmakers -- this actually drives change. But don't waste much time doomscrolling and ruminating -- this does not help, and only helps enhance media company shareholder bottom lines.
The point is that kids these days are exposed to constant encouragement to ruminate, ruminate, ruminate. This doesn't translate into actual action, it just translates into anxiety and depression, and increased dividends for media companies.
Ah, I see we’ve talked past each other. I was speaking to the policy-making angle. I don’t have any good ideas about how to get the policy issues fixed while avoiding scaring the kids. I doubt that’s even possible, tbh.
But yes, let’s smash the soda vending machines as well!
How many of those countries have a democratic republic style of governance like the US? Perhaps it is more dangerous to live in a freedom-loving democratic republic, but the number of people clamoring to get into the US vs the lack of people trying to leave tells us there's value in the risk.
That's not to say we shouldn't strive to get those numbers down, but personally I think we should be focusing on mental health, of which social media has a huge impact. Banning the weapon - as is the common suggestion - is treating the symptom, not the cause.
But we also place too much emphasis on school shootings when, as demonstrated, other things are far more dangerous to kids.
I understand the motivation behind this argument, but I haven’t seen compelling evidence that mental health issues are the “cause” and weapon availability is the “symptom.” There are mentally ill people all over the world, many of whom attempt to commit mass murder but are not as successful as they are in the US. Try killing four people in a row with a knife and you’ll have a much more difficult time. Contrast that to my city, where a fourth person was accidentally killed because they were in proximity of a gunfight a few years ago (in a decent part of town too. Scary.) As large as it is, the same will never happen in Tokyo.
Strictly speaking on numbers though, the evidence I’ve seen weighs heavily on the side of weapon availability being the root cause, with countries and states with fewer weapon restrictions having more weapons-related deaths per capita. All this talk of “weapons aren’t the problem, people are” therefore strikes me as disingenuous.
I thoroughly believe in keeping rifles around because hunting is vital to my community. I remain unconvinced that handguns and automatic weapons are at all important to protecting US democracy (though I’m certainly willing to be disproven).
Statistics from places like Canada or Switzerland (which have and historically had lots of guns per capita) demonstrate that weapon availability itself does not cause such violence.
You compared Japan's rate of violence to America's, and conclude that America's policies must be the cause. This is wrong because you're comparing completely different groups of people. What you should be doing is to compare Japan's rate of violence to the rates among Japanese immigrants in America.
If you want to figure out which variable matters you need to isolate that variable. And if you do, you'll discover that results come from the people much more than the policy.
The difference between America and these places is that America harbors specific subcultures which glorify violence, gangs, drug trade, criminality and generally antisocial behaviour. If you're not involved in these subcultures, or in close proximity to them, you really have nothing to worry about. Hyper-rare stray bullet incidents "in a decent part of town" don't change this. (I recognize that some people can't escape these subcultures and suffer from them, but again, this is a subcultural problem).
Statistic don’t affirm or deny impact. They are facts. The rest is left to you. Why are you trying to exaggerate its impact by suggesting we suppress statistics (facts)?
It’s a political issue not mired in reality but instead in a desire to affect policy. They do it because it works. This discussion is an example of it’d effectiveness. People who will look to the statistics for context in other situations are quick to dismiss them here. There is no rational reason to be anymore concerned about school shootings in America than any other cause of premature death in children and quite a bit of reason to be less concerned. If you want to protect your children focus on drugs, cars, and military recruiters.
You are crazy. No healthy society has school shootings and it has no place in it. To accept anything less then a healthy and violence & gunfree place our kids can grow up in is insane.
It reminds me of the song, "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next." That said, I think prescription drugs are probably more part of the problem than is widely acknowledged.
I'm sure you mean well, but do you understand that even one school shooting in a year should be unthinkable? Do you not understand that ever child in this country is acutely aware of the existence of school shootings and for many of them it absolutely is a cause of significant anxiety?
Yes, I understand. Do you not understand that every child in this country is acutely aware of the existence of school shootings, and for many of them it absolutely is a cause of significant anxiety, because the media has shown them school shootings, and has told them to be anxious about them? Look at death statistics for young people [1]. There are many causes of death which children are not scared of, despite them being far more likely to occur than school shootings.
You’re arguing 0.7% chance of being in a school shooting shouldn’t worry a teenager, for other commentators that’s just a mind-blowing percentage. I think that’s a cultural distinction, since if that was the case, most of people I know would do anything that’s possible to avoid their child to beat that statistic.
Mental health problems are a far greater threat though, and have dramatically increased in the last decade, perhaps partly because it's so easy to worry about big problems outside of their control. The probability of being affected by suicide is significantly more than being of being shot in a school shooting.
We can do two things at once. We can both, within our control, advocate for making school shootings less common, making climate change less problematic, etc, etc, while also try to actually worry about these things less, and not spread a culture of constant fear and disempowerment. Research who makes sense to vote for, what letters to write to lawmakers, and do that. Then, with the rest of your 364 days of the year, relax and focus on what you can control and having a good time.
Agreed in spirit, but fortunately school shootings isn’t a problem in the country I reside. Mental health though is definitely a huge issue though, but I’m not sure how we can fix that. Remembering myself as a teen, anything that was told to be “bad at that age” was a call for experimentation.
That's a cumulative 0.7% chance over 18 (or 22?) years, or 0.035%-ish per year. Not only is that not the right way to think about things even if shootings were random, the numbers aren't correct.
The Edweek numbers are doing what they were designed to do, which is mislead you and parent / grandparent. They are advocacy numbers, deliberately distorted to make things seem as bad as possible in order to drive clicks to further their political agenda. Which is exactly what's happening here!
You could read the edweek links, or the comment by jlawson, or you could do some math yourself. School shootings (in the meaningful sense, not the BS sense that edweek uses--shootings where a student is killed, which is what people really mean) are vanishingly rare in the U.S., a nation of 300,000,000 people. "Preparing" for them is the result of innumeracy, anxiety, fear-mongering, profitability of reporting on them, and lack of critical thinking skills in the U.S. population. The risk is so small that counteracting basically any other risk is a better use of resources. Teach kids about drugs. Teach them about driving safely. Teach them about how to be safe around pools, and how to swim. Teach them to eat healthy. Build them some exercise habits.
An hour invested in any of these activities is much better-spent than an hour of hand-wringing about an almost nonexistent risk of your kid being shot in school in the U.S. It's simple math.
I still think it’s a very cultural thing, since even 0.01% per year would be a huge number for your child to be in a school shooting. Maybe it’s an “outsider perspective”, but school shootings is not even a talking point in most of the places outside of US, thus anything that’s above 0.001% is a lot.
You can follow the edweek links to look at their data. It gives enough detail on any given incident for you to make your own call about whether it's included for political reasons or actually representative of the type of thing parents might fear.
Mother Jones maintains a database of mass shootings int the U.S. that would include school mass shootings, and they (to their great credit) use non-crazy criteria to determine what to include: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-...
This is an asinine argument, as a per-capita comparison with just about any other country shows. I'm not endorsing the Edweek numbers (which were brought into this discussion by someone asserting that school shootings are not a big deal).
I reject your argument that the media is to blame for hyping this. It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random.
"It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random."
We agree about that. If you mean "it's not okay" OR if you mean "it doesn't happen often".
Per capita comparisons aren't informative because you should care about the ABSOLUTE risk, rather than relative risk.
The ABSOLUTE risk (as I calculate in another comment, charitably about 0.000043% per year per student risk of being killed at school) is extremely small. The fact that it's 5x Greece's or something is irrelevant, because both are tiny. If you're trying to answer the question "How do I make sure my kid grows up happy and healthy?" worrying about school shootings is a waste of time. The kid has a 22x higher likelihood of being killed by drowning, focus on that. Or responsible drug use. Or physical fitness. Or driving safely (or not driving!).
Another basic thing you might want to keep in mind is: kids don't die much. Their overall risk of being killed from ANY cause is quite low. If you're worried about maximizing happiness or something, I wouldn't even worry too much about death. Sure, teach them to swim and when they're little make sure there's a lifeguard, but don't stress about them being killed unless you live in a war zone. (And I recognize that too many people live in war zones, and that's a real problem that real people have)
The average of 12 and 35 is 23.5, call it 24 kids on average murdered at school per year in the United States in recent years.
Note that this is not quite correct because it includes murders other than shootings, so it's a little inflated. But anyway.
Also note they say, "“At school” includes on the property of a functioning elementary or secondary school, on the way to or from regular sessions at school, and while attending or traveling to or from a school-sponsored event. In this indicator, the term “at school” is comparable in meaning to the term “school-associated." So again, it's going to be a little inflated because a bunch of these are going to be murders that people wouldn't intuitively understand to be a school shooting (e.g., kid murdered on the way to school in gang crossfire).
Okay, so 24 / 55,548,000 = 0.000043% chance per year of dying in a school shooting for a given U.S. child who attends school, all else being equal.
And of course, all else isn't equal. School shootings aren't random, and are much more common in the types of environments other shootings are common (poor cities, high % black populations, gangs, etc.).
For context, about 520 kids 5-19 die via drowning in the U.S. per year, making it about 22x the risk of being killed at school, all else being equal.
If 0.7% is accurate, then your kid's chances of dying in a car crash for any given year (1 in 93 = 1.07% [1]) is less than your chance of being in a school shooting during your entire childhood!
But the cultural framing (or lack thereof) makes the risk of driving in a car _feel_ like it's completely different
because the media has shown them school shootings, and has told them to be anxious about them
What argument are you making, that news outlets should not report this? I don't think much coaching is required for people to feel anxious about the idea getting shot by a homicidal maniac, even if the probability of a homicidal maniac showing up is relatively low. Applying your logic, we should avoid having reports or drills about it, and any additional loss of life from lack of preparedness should be offset against the aggregate increased happiness of prior obliviousness to the risk.
There are many causes of death which children are not scared of, despite them being far more likely to occur than school shootings.
Homicide infants and grade-school kids is disturbingly high up the list, although that includes domestic violence and other causes rather than only school shootings. But there is a high qualitative difference between dying because you did something stupid or because you are the unfortunate victim of disease or an inherited medical condition, vs someone actively trying to kill you.
Reporting about it in media causes more of them actually so yea. They should stop reporting on them.
Our states are as big as countries so they really should be considered separately. Just because Texas had one doesn't mean a child in California is suddenly in more danger. But actually reporting on it in news media does increase the likelihood because it puts the idea into a shooter's head.
To put it another way the school district I grew up in has never had a mass shooting. Is a child in that school district actually a 0.7% risk? Statistics can be skewed in any direction.
Far higher chance you’ll die on the way to school in a car accident.
School shootings are to the left what terrorist attacks are to the right —- fear-mongering over an ultimately rare and insignificant problem to drive desired policy change.
School shootings are genuinely frightful, not the subject of artificial fear-mongering.
This shallow and ideological analysis represents such a callous disregard for the trauma that any child would experience is they had to go through that.
My biggest fear is my kids dying in a car accident. I'd really prefer not to have to worry about school shootings on top of that, even if they are less likely.
Every single school has an "active shooter" drill. Some boneheaded admins even have a fake instigator come onto campus.
It's extremely disruptive to a child's psyche even if they are never unlucky enough to be at one of the weekly school shootings (which is a horrifically dystopic line that I'd never considered possible 20 years ago).
I bet you remember fire drills as a kid? Now they have those and Active Shooter Drills. It doesn't matter if actual shooting are rare if the fear of them is 'Drilled' into the kid's heads. I saw a paper that tried to measure the impact of first cell phone ownership on teen's mental health. What stood out the most was the whole cohort of teens were at fairly depressed emotional status, the ones impacted by early cell phone ownership even more so. We all here are relatively well educated and by extension fairly well off, we can't imagine what most of the generations following us are going through. I'm gen x so while the economic outlook was beginning to degrade there was still ample opportunity for simple hard work to succeed, that ladder has been pulled up to a large extent. We need a unified progressive taxation system, the current hodgepodge of regressive FICA tax and various credits, cliffs and the slew of tax breaks for investments have worsened class differences.
If you wonder why the rest of the world looks at USA funny, here's a counter point:
There are 9614 schools in Australia, and since 1992 there's been a total of six shootings resulting in a sum of 3 deaths. The deaths were at universities, so strictly speaking no children were lost. There have been no more school shootings since 2012, a year that took no lives.
By US standards we could have 3-4 shootings per year and that would be "not regular"?
Christ.
As a parent in Australia, youth violence with knives as well as distracted drivers concern me. Guns? Not even on my radar.
I would caution you still. Enjoy that you don’t have the blight we have in the US - but also be on guard against any forces towards such politics. It can happen anywhere with the wrong element propping up harmful policies entering the political sphere.
Why do you care so much about school shootings specifically? Shouldn’t be the goal to reduce overall child mortality? In which case it doesn’t make sense to focus on school shootings. They’re a rounding error in child mortality. Compare actual death rates between first-world countries to see what I mean; the US lags behind its Western peers, but the presence of school shootings, which is generally referred to as a decidedly American problem, is not nearly large enough to make an appreciable difference [1].
It's about empathy. Publicly stating that you are concerned about children being shot shows empathy and boosts one's image.
Publicly stating that you are concerned about child obesity is dangerous because it's implicitly stating that people are raising their children incorrectly and making poor decisions, which is more of an accusatory than empathetical statement.
The "think about the children" crowd don't actually want you to think about the children.
Maybe because I'm from one of the countries that doesn't have school shootings, so everytime I see that shit on the news I think I sure am relieved I can send my kid to school and not have that particular anxiety hanging over me. It's just so senseless. It's less about the raw numbers and more about how bloody horrific such an event is for everyone involved.
> I certainly wouldn’t call them a “regular feature”
More than one a week during the school year definitely makes them a regular feature. I can think of one in my entire lifetime in the UK.
Frankly it’s not clear what point you think you’re making, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the one you actually make. A close-to-1%-chance (I didn’t check your math) of experiencing a school shooting is now low, it is ABSURDLY high.
I'm generally in this camp of statistical importance when it comes to things like this, but the US is just about the only country where it happens this much. It shouldn't happen.
I would add that many of the "school shootings" counted in the edweek.org data are not what most people would understand to be school shootings. Things like Person A shoots Person B outside of a school, nobody dies, neither A or B are students, teachers, or otherwise affiliated with the school. Edweek is providing what are known as "advocacy numbers", in that they are stretching the truth as much as they possibly can.
Your kid's chances of being killed in a school shooting are about the same as being struck and killed by lightning (many more people are struck and survive).
> School shootings are such a regular feature of American life...
No they're not.
> ...that every school holds safety drills for the risk.
They also hold drills for tornado, fire, etc. These aren't regular parts of life either; they are emergencies for which people can prepare for the extremely rare chance it actually happens.
We could debate the utility or practical implementation of active shooter drills compared to fire drills, but just waving your hands saying they are injecting horrors into children's heads is overblown. Most kids just find them a waste of time. Just like fire drills.
If you took all school shootings of all first world nations, other than USA, in the last 100 years, that number would still be eclipsed by the average number of yearly USA school shootings. Comparatively the USA is an extreme outlier, even compared to 3rd world nations.
But rather than merely gainsay, I'll support that by observing:
a) here in Australia we regularly, consistently, have zero school shootings each year. Can recommend.
b) you are probably misunderstanding the meaning of regular, and conflating it with frequent.
Halley's Comet is regular - at once every ~76 years. But obviously not frequent.
(I'd argue, as per (a), that the USA has too high a frequency of school shootings as well. If your tolerance for slaughtered children is higher than mine you may disagree with that claim.)
Maybe if you had the same attitude about bus fatalities this would be grounded in reality. If we relax the rules to school bus related fatalities there are almost an order of magnitude more.
And many more people die of heart disease than school bus fatalities, which is arguably more preventable. The point is that a school shooting represents an event that is so extreme, and so completely antithetical to society, that the members of any well-functioning society should have enough shared values to give such an event the level of importance it deserves.
I would think if the US had routine bus fatality counts an order of magnitude larger than other countries, then yes, that would be cause to be alarmed about student bus fatalities in the US as well.
Okay, so you've redefined regular, and are now surprised the person you're responding to doesn't share your unique definition.
It sounds like instead of just mistakenly using it as a synonym for frequent, you're mistakenly using it to mean something like prevalent or widespread or pervasive.
Either way you're responding to a perfectly valid claim by re-purposing the words used by the parent post and then arguing against that.
> I imagine previous generations blamed radio and newspapers.
Speaking of which, when people bring these things up it's usually framed as "see? there's ALWAYS been some new media to complain about!"
But this isn't really true. The treadmill of new mass media really only began at all (in a very small primordial way) with the printing press, and in earnest with radio. Prior to radio, things really were very different, and did not change dramatically for hundreds of years. Radio brought about massive change and people did have a hard time adapting to it, although they did eventually, but ever since then, we've been on a treadmill where just as one generation manages to get a handle on how to deal with a new media technology, yet another one comes out, throwing everyone off balance again.
The idea that this is how things have always been for humans is ignorant. This is new to the last hundred years or so. Prior to this people had the privilege of learning how to deal with the world and pass on their wisdom to their kids without having most of their wisdom invalidated before they could finish raising their kids.
I did "lock down" drills all through my public education, but they never felt any more traumatic than a fire drill. I don't think school shootings are a defining feature of American life.
The only way these mild horrors get into children heads is, again, through social media.
School shootings are such a regular feature of American life that every school holds safety drills for the risk. I don't think all children get to enjoy the same sort of carefree bubble that you did. Media certainly amplifies the awareness of problems but many kids are far better informed than many adults admit, or want to be themselves.