Ah. So your argument is, we should only be looking to prevent probable threats -- whatever that means, exactly. I think that's pretty silly.
If there was a cause X that randomly killed 5 people in the US every year, and there was countermeasure Y that prevented those deaths, you wouldn't implement Y because X isn't a meaningful threat to any single person?
I think the answer should be: it depends. It depends on the costs associated with Y (not just the monetary ones). If it costs multiple billions that would otherwise have gone to, say, cancer research it's probably not worth it. If implementing Y involves installing a 10 PM mandatory curfew for everyone, it's probably not worth it. On the other extreme, if it costs nothing, you'd be negligent to not implement Y.
The point is, your argument is not valid if you don't consider the downsides. Arguably, there is a minimum threshold that needs to be exceeded in order to even make these evaluations, ie. if X only caused 1 death per decade, it might not be worth talking about it, even if it'd cost us almost nothing to implement Y. But I think that threshold should be really low and it really does not apply here.
Arguably, there is a minimum threshold that needs to be exceeded in order to even make these evaluation
Arguably? How many separate things are there in the world that kill 5 or more people in the US each year? An awful lot. IIRC the number of people killed in newspaper related accidents in the UK is about that high.
Society only has so much attention, people only spend so much time learning about the world every day, and people only have so much capacity for worry. To the extent that we use up our worry on things that aren't important we lose the ability to worry about the things that are. I don't expect all the ink spilled on this shooting to save a single life, but if a similar amount of popular attention was devoted to teaching people what drowning really looked like it would probably save about 50 lives every year[1].
If you're going to cross the street it doesn't make sense to split your attention between looking to either side for oncoming cars and looking up for falling objects. Falling objects are very rare, and to the extent that you waste time worrying about them you're more likely to get run over.
That's the kind of argument I had in mind but I didn't want to elaborate on yet another incidental issue. Societal attention is a finite resource (which goes largely wasted). On the other hand, many of these questions don't rise to the level of public discussion, just think of all the safety regulations involved in engineering and manufacturing.
>If there was a cause X that randomly killed 5 people in the US every year, and there was countermeasure Y that prevented those deaths, you wouldn't implement Y because X isn't a meaningful threat to any single person?
Well that's a hard question to answer, we still don't know how to evaluate the value of a human life. So in the general case I would say no I would, if it wasn't prohibitively expensive. (Relative to the number of actual damages caused.)
> I think the answer should be: it depends.
Okay. I didn't cover the kinds of issues you talk about in the following paragraph because in context everyone reading should know about them by this point. I could go on about the civil costs of gun control, the material costs, weighed alternative options like better mental health treatment, or not naming the shooter on national TV; etc.
But all that stuff could fit into a form letter. [0]
EDIT: I accidentally said "yes" when I meant "no" in the first response paragraph. That is, in the general case; no I would implement countermeasure Y to prevent 5 annual deaths.
If there was a cause X that randomly killed 5 people in the US every year, and there was countermeasure Y that prevented those deaths, you wouldn't implement Y because X isn't a meaningful threat to any single person?
I think the answer should be: it depends. It depends on the costs associated with Y (not just the monetary ones). If it costs multiple billions that would otherwise have gone to, say, cancer research it's probably not worth it. If implementing Y involves installing a 10 PM mandatory curfew for everyone, it's probably not worth it. On the other extreme, if it costs nothing, you'd be negligent to not implement Y.
The point is, your argument is not valid if you don't consider the downsides. Arguably, there is a minimum threshold that needs to be exceeded in order to even make these evaluations, ie. if X only caused 1 death per decade, it might not be worth talking about it, even if it'd cost us almost nothing to implement Y. But I think that threshold should be really low and it really does not apply here.