6 ms·
Schools are safer than they were in the 90s
- welcome_dragon 9y agoI can only imagine the level-headed discussions this is going to spark.
- mlechha 9y agoShouldn't the comparison be made against school shootings world wide? Or at least be normalized for overall crime rate or something?
- danielvf 9y agoThe numbers are so tiny that comparisons are pretty much irrelevant. Since 1996 there have been just 8 mass k-12 shootings (incidents involving 4 or more school deaths, excluding the assailant), in a nation of 330 million people. That's so far into small numbers territory that any comparisons are guaranteed to be overwhelmed by noise.
- pjc50 9y ago> incidents involving 4 or more school deaths That number seems suspicious; you'd get a very different answer if your criterion was "any gunshot wound at a school", for example. But that definition might be a better match for what people think of as a school shooting. (e.g. Northern Ireland had a very large number of terrorist attacks where a warning was given allowing evacuation - would they not count as terrorist incidents even if nobody was killed? I suspect not)
- toast0 9y agoAny gunshot would at a school probably includes a very different pattern of behavior. If someone wants to murder (or maim) a specific person, or small group of people, they may carry that out with a gun, because it's expedient, but might switch to a knife if guns aren't available. If someone wants to murder (or maim) a large number of people, guns or explosives are really the only practical means; mass knifings have happened, but are even more rare than mass shootings.
- mlechha 9y agoWhen making a decision as to whether something is small, large, or tiny one needs a scale. What's the scale here? For example, if the rest of the world combined has had 12 mass k-12 shootings, then American accounts for 40% of the total shootings which is a huge fraction. So in my original question I was trying to find the right scale. Edit: In a comment below, this article was linked https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-against-36-other-countries-put-together/ https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-.... Indeed, on this scale we see a very different picture!
- testvox 9y agoWhy? That would seem to pick up lots of factors unrelated to the issue of school shootings in the United States.
- dv_dt 9y agohttps://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-against-36-other-countries-put-together/ https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-...
- Bernard_sha_256 9y agoCan someone say "Security Theater"? In cases like these I like to take the Freakonomics formula for risk, that outrage factors more into observed risk than actual danger. We're more worried about Terrorism than Heart Disease, even as we have far more control over the latter.
- mieseratte 9y agoI like to ask my "ban the AR-15" friends how they feel about the TSA.
- news_to_me 9y agoWhy?
- frozenesper 9y agoI agree that much of what the TSA does is security theater, but... at least we got that? It shows that we as a society cared enough to "put on a show" of protecting ourselves from terrorism. I welcome more research on effective ways to reduce gun violence, but unfortunately ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment_(1996) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment_(1996) ) researchers have been prevented from doing so. The clear, most effective way to reduce gun violence is to reduce the number of guns. (cf. every other developed nation.) However, the current interpretation of the 2nd amendment seems to make that difficult.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- frozenesper 9y agoIt's precisely because we have far more control over heart disease that we do not fear it. I can accept getting heart disease—maybe it was my fault?—much more readily that being actively, senselessly, killed by someone else. Terrorists know this too, which is why definitionally terrorism is meant to induce fear by way of its unpredictability. You wrote "security theater" to imply that we shouldn't attempt to address terrorism and school shootings because they don't kill enough people. I think that we ought to fund research into good, effective, ways to reduce gun violence _because_ it's something that we don't control ourselves.
- adammichaelc 9y agoThe data they use in the study, don’t match the data gathered by the community. There is a clear upward-trend since the 60’s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_...
- larrydag 9y agoFirst I'm not sure that is a good source. We have no idea if this list is vetted. Second, just because there is an increase in volume doesn't necessarily mean an increase in rate.
- AstralStorm 9y agoI'd it a trend though? Or is it just reporting accuracy? Perhaps just scaled to population it is constant? A Wikipedia list does not answer any of those questions.
- danielvf 9y agoI looked through that list, and once you filter out the non-school deaths, it seem to line up with the article. For example, Rancho Tehama Reserve, California is listed as six deaths, but that was a shooter who killed five adults at other locations, then fired at a locked down school, injuring one student, before killing himself. So zero students killed. There are quite a few like that in the list.
- SonicSoul 9y agoit’s unlikely that any of them will prevent mass school shootings “The thing to remember is that these are extremely rare events, and no matter what you can come up with to prevent it, the shooter will have a workaround,” Fox said, adding that over the past 35 years, there have been only five cases in which someone ages 18 to 20 used an assault rifle in a mass shooting. this seems weak. if shootings are rare events stopping one would make a considerable difference. just because assault rifles were rarely used in past 35 years in what way does that influence a future projection? What if we had a Vegas type event around a school? I don't really understand the thesis here
- AstralStorm 9y agoThe problem is that because it is such a rare event, efficacy of any intervention is extremely hard to evaluate. So essentially whatever you do is guesswork. To put it simply: how's do you know if whatever you did has an effect instead of the numbers being a result of a random downswing? (You can know if you can know by employing Bayesian statistics - with these low rates you really cannot.)
- SonicSoul 9y agowell what about the idea that other countries adjusted their laws after such incidents and it made a difference in crime statistics?
- rvo 9y agoI hate guns and I want them banned in America. But, crime goes up after gun bans https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/ https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-... I am okay with that because it spreads the violence but each instance of violence is less deadly. So for the sake of no school schootings, I will accept increase in general violence. Let's repeal the 2A.
- pjc50 9y ago
- 0003 9y ago>Since 1996, there have been 16 multiple victim shootings in schools, or incidents involving 4 or more victims and at least 2 deaths by firearms, excluding the assailant. 17. Literally happening just as this was posted: https://www.wxyz.com/news/police-responding-to-reports-of-shots-fired-at-central-michigan-university https://www.wxyz.com/news/police-responding-to-reports-of-sh... Edit: Actually this may or may not meet the definition since their definition requires 4 or more casualties. Still.
- cimmanom 9y agoIIRC there was a wave of school shootings in 1992-96, almost a dozen total; Columbine was the worst of them in terms of casualties, but in some ways just the culmination of a pattern. I don't know why you would start counting _after_ 1996.
- Torgo 9y agoNew York was putting metal detectors into schools in the 1980's. They were for gangs, but I guess a school shooting is a school shooting.
- codemac 9y agoWhy don't they have the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007? This data seems to be missing what a lot of people would call "school shootings".
- huffmsa 9y agoI think this is k-12 only data
- crescentfresh 9y agoHelp, I cannot find the actual study (paper). It's referenced (in this article) as: James Alan Fox and Emma E. Fridel, "The Three R's of School Shootings: Risk, Readiness, and Response," in H. Shapiro, ed., The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education: Forms, Factors, and Preventions But from Wiley's listing of papers in this volume (https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Wiley+Handbook+on+Violence+in+Education-p-9781118966679 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Wiley+Handbook+on+Violence+i...) the only article written by Fox and Fridel is called "The Menace of School Shootings in America: Panic and Overresponse". Maybe it was renamed since?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- xg15 9y agoI have seen those studies pop up from time to time on HN with conclusions altering between "it's reachin worrying proportions", "there is an increase", "there is no increase", "they are so rare as to not worth considering". From what I understand, the decision of what kinds of shootings are included has a large influence on the conclusion - e.g., the "there have been 18 shootings in 2018 so far" articles from a while ago used a comparatively low threshold for inclusion. The threshold for this study seems to be "4 or more victims", which I think is similar to the threshold official publications used at the beginning of the Obama administration. I believe there were complaints that the threshold is unreasonably high which caused it to be adjusted - however, I don't have any sources for that ready, so if anyone knows more, please correct me. In any case, it's important to look at the criteria if one wants to compare those studies.
- cliff_hanger 9y agoIt's not clear to me why this study would set those thresholds for the underlying data (4+ Victims & 2+ deaths), this seems to downplay the number of incidents. At the very least there should be some explanation of why this limit is in place, as it has a significant impact on the findings. Closest thing I can find to an accurate data-set is here: https://www.kaggle.com/ecodan/us-school-shootings-dataset/notebook https://www.kaggle.com/ecodan/us-school-shootings-dataset/no.... Data seems to be a blend of a northwestern study and the wikipedia list of shootings.
- xg15 9y agoAbsolutely. Even if there is some research question by which this criterion would be useful, it doesn't lead the underlying conclusions that school shootings in general are a rare event, declining in frequency. Interestingly, according to [1], the criterion used by the FBI to assess mass shooting used to be "at least 4 persons killed or wounded" - until it got changed to "at least 3 persons" in 2013. So the criterion the study uses is stricter than both the old and the new way of counting the FBI uses. Note also that, according to [2], even though the rate of mass shooting at schools seems to be decreasing, the rate of mass shootings in general is increasing. See also [3] for more information about the different definitions and ways of counting. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting [2] https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-study-2000-2013-1.pdf https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-study-200... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/02/another-school-shootingbut-whos-counting/553412/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/02/anothe...
- ghufran_syed 9y agoPerhaps they should do a case control study - places that had mass shootings vs places that didn’t? I’m pretty sure there have been no mass shootings at gun shows or gun clubs, I wonder if there might be some relationship there worth exploring?
- pjc50 9y agoInterestingly the NRA national convention reduces gun injuries everywhere else: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-28/for-these-three-days-nra-reduces-gun-injuries-research-shows https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-28/for-these...
- CompanionCuuube 9y ago"In relative terms, the decline is small -- accounting for one fewer injury for every 300,000 Americans."
- DrScump 9y agoBut there are 1,100 times as many Americans. "The difference in his study amounts to a reduction of several hundred injuries per convention per year"
- epanchin 9y agoThis is garbage. A drop in the number of deaths might just demonstrate an improvement in emergency medical procedures.
- Tech-Noir 9y agoAnalysis of two decades in the UK, where in 1997 they banned video games and mental illness: 1996: 16 children and their teacher shot dead 1997-2018: 0 shot dead
- ng-user 9y agoHow does a nation ban mental illness?
- d0lph 9y agoAnd I'm pretty sure the UK still has video games?
- empthought 9y agowhoosh
- pjc50 9y ago(original post is obviously sarcasm: the UK banned handguns.)
- dmritard96 9y agoPersonally not sure I care about a 90s baseline at all. And most relevantly, the difference now is access to information anywhere/everywhere and in more detail/angle/opinion without a lot of latency.
- dv_dt 9y agoCompared to the US in the past schools are safer, but in terms of school killings compared to those in other nations, the US is still ridiculously high. https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-against-36-other-countries-put-together/ https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-...
- bhldr 9y agoCan we get the word 'american' inserted in the title. It's a very local problem.
- patch_collector 9y agoBased on a variety of comments here, I was curious about how many mass shootings there have been over the years. Mother Jones had a list that looked pretty good (well cited). I put it into a graph, which I think makes it a lot easier to understand. Reasonable additions to this might be adding a line for type of weapon used. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mwNeZ_KHL_nLd85eOeI-ZATaiUFpkaZ3nTlw8ujZXtc/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mwNeZ_KHL_nLd85eOeI-...