You’re arguing 0.7% chance of being in a school shooting shouldn’t worry a teenager, for other commentators that’s just a mind-blowing percentage. I think that’s a cultural distinction, since if that was the case, most of people I know would do anything that’s possible to avoid their child to beat that statistic.
Mental health problems are a far greater threat though, and have dramatically increased in the last decade, perhaps partly because it's so easy to worry about big problems outside of their control. The probability of being affected by suicide is significantly more than being of being shot in a school shooting.
We can do two things at once. We can both, within our control, advocate for making school shootings less common, making climate change less problematic, etc, etc, while also try to actually worry about these things less, and not spread a culture of constant fear and disempowerment. Research who makes sense to vote for, what letters to write to lawmakers, and do that. Then, with the rest of your 364 days of the year, relax and focus on what you can control and having a good time.
Agreed in spirit, but fortunately school shootings isn’t a problem in the country I reside. Mental health though is definitely a huge issue though, but I’m not sure how we can fix that. Remembering myself as a teen, anything that was told to be “bad at that age” was a call for experimentation.
That's a cumulative 0.7% chance over 18 (or 22?) years, or 0.035%-ish per year. Not only is that not the right way to think about things even if shootings were random, the numbers aren't correct.
The Edweek numbers are doing what they were designed to do, which is mislead you and parent / grandparent. They are advocacy numbers, deliberately distorted to make things seem as bad as possible in order to drive clicks to further their political agenda. Which is exactly what's happening here!
You could read the edweek links, or the comment by jlawson, or you could do some math yourself. School shootings (in the meaningful sense, not the BS sense that edweek uses--shootings where a student is killed, which is what people really mean) are vanishingly rare in the U.S., a nation of 300,000,000 people. "Preparing" for them is the result of innumeracy, anxiety, fear-mongering, profitability of reporting on them, and lack of critical thinking skills in the U.S. population. The risk is so small that counteracting basically any other risk is a better use of resources. Teach kids about drugs. Teach them about driving safely. Teach them about how to be safe around pools, and how to swim. Teach them to eat healthy. Build them some exercise habits.
An hour invested in any of these activities is much better-spent than an hour of hand-wringing about an almost nonexistent risk of your kid being shot in school in the U.S. It's simple math.
I still think it’s a very cultural thing, since even 0.01% per year would be a huge number for your child to be in a school shooting. Maybe it’s an “outsider perspective”, but school shootings is not even a talking point in most of the places outside of US, thus anything that’s above 0.001% is a lot.
You can follow the edweek links to look at their data. It gives enough detail on any given incident for you to make your own call about whether it's included for political reasons or actually representative of the type of thing parents might fear.
Mother Jones maintains a database of mass shootings int the U.S. that would include school mass shootings, and they (to their great credit) use non-crazy criteria to determine what to include: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-...
This is an asinine argument, as a per-capita comparison with just about any other country shows. I'm not endorsing the Edweek numbers (which were brought into this discussion by someone asserting that school shootings are not a big deal).
I reject your argument that the media is to blame for hyping this. It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random.
"It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random."
We agree about that. If you mean "it's not okay" OR if you mean "it doesn't happen often".
Per capita comparisons aren't informative because you should care about the ABSOLUTE risk, rather than relative risk.
The ABSOLUTE risk (as I calculate in another comment, charitably about 0.000043% per year per student risk of being killed at school) is extremely small. The fact that it's 5x Greece's or something is irrelevant, because both are tiny. If you're trying to answer the question "How do I make sure my kid grows up happy and healthy?" worrying about school shootings is a waste of time. The kid has a 22x higher likelihood of being killed by drowning, focus on that. Or responsible drug use. Or physical fitness. Or driving safely (or not driving!).
Another basic thing you might want to keep in mind is: kids don't die much. Their overall risk of being killed from ANY cause is quite low. If you're worried about maximizing happiness or something, I wouldn't even worry too much about death. Sure, teach them to swim and when they're little make sure there's a lifeguard, but don't stress about them being killed unless you live in a war zone. (And I recognize that too many people live in war zones, and that's a real problem that real people have)
The average of 12 and 35 is 23.5, call it 24 kids on average murdered at school per year in the United States in recent years.
Note that this is not quite correct because it includes murders other than shootings, so it's a little inflated. But anyway.
Also note they say, "“At school” includes on the property of a functioning elementary or secondary school, on the way to or from regular sessions at school, and while attending or traveling to or from a school-sponsored event. In this indicator, the term “at school” is comparable in meaning to the term “school-associated." So again, it's going to be a little inflated because a bunch of these are going to be murders that people wouldn't intuitively understand to be a school shooting (e.g., kid murdered on the way to school in gang crossfire).
Okay, so 24 / 55,548,000 = 0.000043% chance per year of dying in a school shooting for a given U.S. child who attends school, all else being equal.
And of course, all else isn't equal. School shootings aren't random, and are much more common in the types of environments other shootings are common (poor cities, high % black populations, gangs, etc.).
For context, about 520 kids 5-19 die via drowning in the U.S. per year, making it about 22x the risk of being killed at school, all else being equal.
If 0.7% is accurate, then your kid's chances of dying in a car crash for any given year (1 in 93 = 1.07% [1]) is less than your chance of being in a school shooting during your entire childhood!
But the cultural framing (or lack thereof) makes the risk of driving in a car _feel_ like it's completely different
