Google maps shows location of San Bruno shooting

[m52go]

Folks, the number of shooting crimes (including school shootings) in the United States is going down. I know times like this are the worst times to mention this fact, but it's true [0].

The media frenzy makes this look like some kind of out-of-control epidemic, but that's just not the case.

This does not mean we should do nothing about them...any shooting is an event that should not happen. But it's important to realize this fact because too many people are approaching the topic emotionally rather than rationally and proposing extreme reactions to trends that simply aren't as extreme as they perceive them to be.

If you disagree, ask yourself why there are so many cases of shootings in the news all of a sudden. While some recent shootings have indeed been tail-event massacres (i.e., unusually major), many have been events that would otherwise not have attracted much attention (that psycho teacher who shot himself in a closet a few weeks ago comes to mind...why the heck was that on national news?).

[0] https://mises.org/wire/there-are-fewer-school-shootings-now-...

[johnny313]

> Folks, the number of shooting crimes (including school shootings) in the United States is going down.

This is not supported by other analyses that look at the issue. FiveThirtyEight looked at several measures of school shootings / mass shootings and came to the opposite conclusion. [0]

[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-matter-how-you-measu...

[dabeeeenster]

"The media frenzy makes this look like some kind of out-of-control epidemic, but that's just not the case."

That's exactly the case. Just because numbers are going down doesn't make it any less of an epidemic.

"people are approaching the topic emotionally rather than rationally and proposing extreme reactions"

Suggesting people don't own assault rifles is not an "extreme reaction".

[ericmcer]

Do you think this is a coordinated, planned effort by the media, or an organic event? Did they decide they wanted to convince the public that shootings are suddenly a much bigger issue, or did shootings start to be great selling news so now they seek them out aggressively.

It kind of reminds me of the late 90's and early 2000's when all of a sudden kids getting abducted became huge news. That forever changed the way adults could interact with strange kids, and how parents viewed unknown adults.

[pavs]

The link is not only factually wrong but also from a biased source.

Mass shootings in the US: there have been 1,624 in 1,870 days

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/...

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...

[euyyn]

Are you Progress Man? :) https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/excelsior

[godelski]

I just wish we would talk about things that are causing the shootings in the first place and not boil it down to overly simplified explanations of "can't stop crazy" vs "why do we even need guns?" All that does is create an endless loop of stupidity and people dying. I mean the gun death problem is extremely multifaceted and there's a huge difference in how school shootings, active shooters, gangs, suicides, etc happen and how you mitigate them.

[wavefunction]

I suppose we can kill the hysteria driving mass gun ownership then! I'm sure the NRA will be happy to turn down the hyperbolic rhetoric about how you could be double rape-murdered at any given second now that these results on violent crime have come out and we can all breath easier.

[XR0CSWV3h3kZWg]

There are many responses to the various arguments that the article employs, some more reasonable than others, but really the thing that stuck with me was that this is the worst plot I have seen used unironically in 2018:

https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/publ...

[tomlock]

America is 12th in the world in per-capita gun deaths by country. Should we be satisfied with 12th?

[jjakque]

> The media frenzy makes this look like some kind of out-of-control epidemic

Any rationale behind media sensationalize shootings? Just purely for the stun/shock factor? or perhaps borderline propaganda towards certain agenda?

[webnrrd2k]

mises.org is well known as a strongly libertarian site. I personally have trouble taking opinions from them at face value. I think it would be roughly equivalent to taking Fox News's opinion of Democrats at face value. Yeah, maybe they have a good point, maybe they don't, but I don't trust the source enough put the effort in to work it out.

[wffurr]

Can you not start this discussion while the blood is still wet on the ground? What is wrong with you?

[just_testing]

This is one of those statistics where there are only two distinct values that matter:

- Zero shootings - Too many shootings

Any number bigger than zero is too much and we should do our best as a society to decrease it to zero.

[mmanfrin]

What a damning indictment of our culture that this is a feature.

[forgottenpass]

Absolutely. It's been well worn advice from psychologists to the media that the loud, panicked approach to shooting news encourages more shooters.

The media takes the advice to always mention suicide help lines when reporting on suicide. But they never take the advice to cover shooting news locally, without detail on the shooters identity and without hysterics.

[lolc]

Given that suicidal shooters often crave attention, this is the wrong signal to send.

[gooseus]

Thank you, I think the best policy for approaching these rampage suicide murderers is to minimize their exposure in popular culture and forbid the use of their name in the media.

This has the added benefit of not stigmatizing their family, who likely have little to do with the event.

As an aside, I also think any killers of this kind should have their wishes for burial null and void with their brains and bodies given immediately to scientific research.

[godelski]

> Given that suicidal shooters often crave attention, this is the wrong signal to send.

This CAN NOT be said enough. Blasting a name and attention (fame) leads to copycats.

[trilinearnz]

Not really. This is just GPS data for Google's SOS alerts, which could be any kind of disaster.

[jonas21]

Note that this feature isn't just for active shooters -- it's for emergencies and crises in general [1].

[1] https://support.google.com/sosalerts

[itakedrugs]

large pot holes and bad railroad crossings would be nice too... should be easy to automatically detect them using all the sensors in the phones crossing them

[donw]

This could be a great tool for both detecting and prioritizing repair efforts as well, and robust even in the shape of shifting traffic patterns.

[on_and_off]

This would be pretty useful for eskates too !

Skating would be pretty easy if the streets were not in an awful state.

[bpchaps]

The where's Waldo April fool's joke makes it a little surreal: https://imgur.com/a/DoQEl

(Pardon the phone screenshot)

[spondyl]

I had a similar feeling when it was reported that the injured were transported to Zuckerberg General Hospital[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_General_Hospital

[wnevets]

I thought this was an onion article.

[joshumax]

I'm working with a team to create a consensus-based distributed alert system for emergencies [1], and as horrible as shootings are (having personally been stuck in the middle of mass panic due to a gun threat I can say it's insanely frightening), providing spatial and statistical tools to display, model, and alert dangerous events like shootings will be critical in helping reduce response times and increase assistance to victims, as well as figure out commonalities between events. It's interesting to see Google try to tackle that problem through augmenting emergencies over Google maps.

1: http://proximityapp.xyz

[wffurr]

The phrasing of this title is far too flip for a tragedy, especially one this fresh.

[bwang29]

Wondering if the dot is placed as the center of gravity of the building , or it is the actual room when you zoom in.

Also I wonder why some of the rooms are given names on the map such as "space invader" and "residence evil" but not the other ones.

[jwfxpr]

Is your contention that "hackers" aren't concerned with current social issues, or that they aren't concerned with the intersection of technology and society, or that they aren't concerned with public safety, or that they aren't interested in new features in widely used software and technological services?