[bamfly]

> Also specially in the US with all the school shootings, banning kids from having phones that allow them to call for help seems like a really bad idea.

Run the numbers. This isn't a justification for much, really.

They're a shameful occurrence, but the odds of a kid being present during any kind of shooting at school (gang member standing in the parking lot and firing at someone not on school property, and not a student or faculty member; targeted jilted-lover killing of a teacher; targeted crime-related [think: beef over drug territory] killing of one student by another, with a gun; and yes, also mass shootings) at any point during their k-12 education, are low. Present, not killed or injured. Indiscriminate mass shootings are very far from being the most common kind of shooting at schools, so that's even less likely—being present at all, that is, not hurt or killed, that's vanishingly unlikely over all 13 years of school. Nb that's assuming even-odds of shootings at all schools, which isn't the case.

So you're harming all kids' educations and exposing them to some messed-up stuff (talk. to. some. teachers. What you think I meant by that? Shock images or something? Not as messed-up as I actually mean) in case they're in a mass shooting (rare) and also their having a phone makes a difference in the outcome (narrowing the slice of this-was-a-good-idea circumstances even more)

It's awful that they happen, absolutely, and they are one small but striking feature of our messed-up gun laws and culture and we really do need to fix all that, but perceptions of how common they are are completely out of phase with reality, which leads to bad decision-making.