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la6472 | 3 years ago

Right now it is hard to look at our kids faces and not feel the impact of this tragedy. I don’t know about everyone but for most people their kids lives are way more important than their right to bear military grade guns. If there is no perfect solution we have to live with a less than perfect solution. If the solution is to legally make it harder for people to access such guns then so be it.

discuss

order

cypress66|3 years ago

As tragic as these events may be, the probability of your kids dying to a school shooting is still incredibly low, and a few orders of magnitude less than car accidents.

Doing some quick math, it seems like it's around 100 to 1000 times more likely that some kid dies to some accident than a mass shooting. But people don't seem to worry 1000 times more about these accidents than school shootings. And it would actually be much easier to reduce the accident number than the shooting number.

MrMoenty|3 years ago

Perhaps this is approximately true if you focus exclusively on mass shootings at schools. But shootings overall are one of the leading causes of deaths for children in the US.

See for instance the CDC's visualizations on causes of death per age group [1]. In 2020, 476 children aged 10-14 died in traffic accidents involving motor vehicles. 218 children aged 10-14 were killed in homicides by firearms.

Those two numbers are very much in the same order of magnitude. This is also the case in prior, non-Covid years.

[1] https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/home

dncornholio|3 years ago

> the probability of your kids dying to a school shooting is still incredibly low

It's only about 50000% higher than in any other place of the world. Is this what you say to you children? That they don't get to get unlucky????????

School should be one of the safest places of the world. People are discussing what COVID will do to the future of their kids. I wonder what living in fear will do instead, which has a much much much bigger impact than 2 years of missed school.

rswail|3 years ago

On that reasoning, all of the "lockdowns" and "active shooter drills" and all the other bullshit that the US makes its children undertake in school are a complete waste of time.

Are you seriously trying to argue that school shootings don't happen often enough to try to stop them? Or that society can't do two things (reduce accidental deaths and reduce mass murder) at the same time?

The rationalization of an insane gun culture is incessant and foolish. Guns are a tool and the bullshit that somehow the civilian population would "defend" itself against military coups by the US military, or even more ridiculous, against invasion, is an excuse to allow the ongoing fetish of guns.

For 99.99% of the population, guns are dangerous to have, not because someone might attack you, but because guns are dangerous to have in the home. They are misused, mistakenly left unsecured, and accessed by people (children, those with mental illness) that shouldn't.

Hell, you can't even agree on background checks because of some stupidity regarding having a "register" in case the "government" comes after your weapons.

The US is an empire in decline, and your internal division around this "culture" is a large part of the dis/mis-information exercise that has infected the body politic.

The NRA is a lobby group for gun manufacturers that has bought numerous politicians, while lying to its members about its purpose. The fact that so many actually believe the bullshit is a prime example of dis/mis-information.

lliamander|3 years ago

There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year. Many just involve presenting or brandishing the gun without having to use it.

Could you look someone in the face who has used a gun to protect themselves or their family and tell them they will need to give up that gun for "public safety"?

rswail|3 years ago

Absolutely. Nowhere else in the civilized world do people rely on having a gun to "protect themselves or their family".

Perhaps you need to look at why, in your society, there are so many "opportunities" for "defensive gun uses".