> 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.
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.