@gulovsen This was well written. I’d call it persuasive if I didn’t already agree with it going in. I do wish it ended in a tangible call to action but I guess if anyone knew that we’d all be doing it.
@Wikisteff @Haste @gulovsen Personally, I think it's bullshit. I think the whole premise is bullshit.
I'm reminded of that ridiculous song about waiting on the world to change. Like... you are IN the world, my dude. Are you doing anything to help, or are you just sitting around expecting other people to do all the work? Are you even voting? Volunteering? Campaigning for candidates you like? Do you even understand basic civics?
@textualdeviance @Wikisteff @Haste @gulovsen Agreed.
And there were other similar issues with the article. "Nuclear bombs weren't going off in their classrooms every day," the article says, implying that mass shootings are going off every day. But that's only true if you're watching the national news. Most kids have never been near a shooting, much less involved in one, and the "active shooter" drills that adults make them repeat over and over seem to be feeding the problem more than the solution.
Likewise "robots are going to take their jobs" is a century-old concern with shiny new branding.
Kids do have legitimate reasons to feel sad and depressed in the modern day, but 90% of those reasons are the same ones kids have been dealing with since the dawn of humanity.
Gun violence
I just wanted to offer one correction about your post. You mentioned that you don’t believe the author experiences threat of mass shootings frequently compared to the use of nuclear weapons.
According to one estimate, there have been over 300 school shootings in the US since Columbine. Definitions vary, but there have been as many as 23 this year, in k-12 alone.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year-how-many-and-where/2023/01
Gun violence
@Haste Right, and while we can agree that's abhorrent, it's important to put it into context. There are, by one count at least, about 120,000 schools serving k-12 students in the United States. So, 23 would mean that 0.02% of schools experienced a shooting in the past year.
Now, obviously, any school shootings are too many school shootings, but it's worth understanding that the vast, vast majority of students' exposure to school shootings comes indirectly through the panic expressed by media and authority figures, not from the shootings themselves.
Gun violence
I’m not comfortable with your argument for a couple of reasons, but primarily because you could use that same method to trivialize the use of the atomic bomb (by distributing the horror of people killed across the total population).
I’m not super interested in debating that.
My intent was correcting a statistical inaccuracy (frequency of mass shootings per year) to reduce misinformation. You’re free to interpret that data as you wish.
Gun violence
@Haste Those are totally valid concerns. Fwiw, my intent was not to trivialize the tragedies themselves, but rather to take issue with the breathless media coverage that creates a sense of dread that might otherwise not be so pervasive.
Although, I did feel somewhat compelled to run the numbers and the percentage of Japan's 1945 population killed by atomic bombs (0.3%) was 3000x the percentage of K-12 kids who died in school shootings out of the total US student enrollment in 2022 (0.0001%).
Gun violence
@MattFerrel @Haste Right, and, as I understand it, there's little-to-no evidence of the effectiveness of active-shooter drills to actually prepare kids rather than just filling them with a never-ending sense of impending dread. That goes to my point above about panic expressed by authority figures.
Glad to hear police stopped that kid you mentioned in time. I hope whoever he got the gun from (most likely a parent) is arrested as well.
Gun violence
@LouisIngenthron @Haste you are right about the numbers but that doesn’t really change the fear that kids and parents have. Active shooter drills and the occasional campus lockdown take a toll, even if there is no violence.
A local high school started their first day with a lockdown because a 15 year old brought a gun to school. Fortunately police were tipped off so they could arrest him before anything happened.