[vtsnowedin]

Let me say a couple of completely politically incorrect things here. If you want to actually reduce the number of gun deaths in America first you will issue a lethal red pill to any person diagnosed with a terminal condition so they have a choice on their way out less messy then using one of their guns to splatter their brains about the room.
I don't see gun suicides as a problem but apparently the bleeding hearts do.
Next you can disallow every black or black Hispanic man from owning any type of fire arm. They are just eight percent of the population but commit over half of the gun homicides in the country. Crush up all the AR 15s in the country and you will cause a civil war and only reduce deaths by 400 or so. Remove the guns of all types from the black males and you would reduce homicides by 7,000 a year.
Of course that can't happen but it just shows you that getting rid of the "assault rifles" is a waste of time.

[KaiserJeep]

I'd like everybody to take a step back and consider a few things from a perspective that is removed from this most recent tragedy.

First, firearm deaths are only the seventh cause of preventable deaths in the USA:


Secondly, for all of the publicity they generate, mass shootings only account for about 1% of the gun-related deaths. The statistics are in fact heavily weighted towards suicide:

...and I'm with vtsnowedin, people facing unpleasent deaths should have the right to suicide.

Thirdly, what has changed in the recent past is the intensity of media reporting. Actual firearm deaths have been declining for 25 years even while gun ownership surged:


Of course, even a single gun homicide is a tragedy. However, if only one in a million humans is sick enough to commit a mass shooting, with 320 million people in America, you would expect 320 mass shootings per year. The actual rate has been 8.6 mass shootings per year for several years. ("Mass shooting" being defined as four or more victims.)

I'll have to say, these figures indicate there is not a problem, things are improving over time, and no changes are required.

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'I')'d like everybody to take a step back and consider a few things from a perspective that is removed from this most recent tragedy.

First, firearm deaths are only the seventh cause of preventable deaths in the USA:


Secondly, for all of the publicity they generate, mass shootings only account for about 1% of the gun-related deaths. The statistics are in fact heavily weighted towards suicide:

...and I'm with vtsnowedin, people facing unpleasent deaths should have the right to suicide.

Thirdly, what has changed in the recent past is the intensity of media reporting. Actual firearm deaths have been declining for 25 years even while gun ownership surged:


Of course, even a single gun homicide is a tragedy. However, if only one in a million humans is sick enough to commit a mass shooting, with 320 million people in America, you would expect 320 mass shootings per year. The actual rate has been 8.6 mass shootings per year for several years. ("Mass shooting" being defined as four or more victims.)

I'll have to say, these figures indicate there is not a problem, things are improving over time, and no changes are required.

[KaiserJeep]

I think you are right. In fact I'd have used charts that were current through end of 2017 had I been able to find any. But my main point about guns was still made with stale charts.

[dissident]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dissident', ' ') Instead of crying rivers of fake tears, the media and the rest of the "community" can make sure that schools have gun control checkpoints and that no student or random clown off the street can enter the building and school grounds fully loaded.

[evilgenius]

There is another thing to think about when it comes to school shootings. This wouldn't apply to mass shootings per se. That is that schools could be kept deliberately small. High schools could be kept large enough to have the opportunities available to students, such as shops that contain the sorts of machinery necessary to prepare kids for work and computers that have the latest software so that they are up to speed whether for college or the workplace. Size goes a long way toward being able to afford such things. School districts, though, can use the size of the district in order to gain some advantages, such as cheaper software prices. They don't necessarily need to duplicate shops across every school. They could use advanced scheduling and pool shop resources. School size could be kept low.

The reason for keeping school size low is just to reduce the chance of social pressure which leads up to certain behavior. It's a way of maintaining complexity, but preventing critical mass in any single, save for the most popular groups. Smallness alone wouldn't prevent bullying. It might make for a structure which AI software could manage well enough to spot it. Small enough to track what is going on and, since there would be less of a chance that extraneous factors are causing something (too large a size of a marginal group than expected randomly skewing social interactions, especially in overcrowded conditions?), keep that data and make statistical analyses of them. The purpose wouldn't really be to stop school shootings. It'd just be a means to help educate students. The best thing it would do would be to help establish a way to track and analyze the amount of time an individual student has actually spent in a particular learning activity versus how well that activity has helped them learn. Social media could prove useful as part of such a system. It's that when that kind of data is available it can probably be used to model for things like alienation of certain groups or individuals, or if a person is resistant to expected change.

I don't know what small is either. I guess 500 students in a high school? The best way would be to experiment. That way we might find all sorts of correlations. The results might teach us things we don't know.

[Cog]

Actually evilgenius you are onto something here with small schools versus large. There has been a massive consolidation, especially at the high school level, of small towns having a consolidated high school. I think kids sort of get lost and forgotten about when you have several thousand kids in a high school. My graduating class in high school was 25. Yeah twenty-five. We knew each other intimately but in a large high school, you are just one another among thousands of others.

I would add though that school does not teach you values. You learn those at home with your parents.

[Newfie]

While I like KJs argument I don’t think it’s a starter. There are many who simply not listen to such arguments. They are responding from the heart and it completely over rides their logic. Not that the left is alone in that department, I will forgo examples for sake of thread continuity.

Perhaps where we start is requiring our schools to teach critical thinking and analysis. It where would we get teachers and positive examples?

[jedrider]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'I')'d like everybody to take a step back and consider a few things from a perspective that is removed from this most recent tragedy.
First, firearm deaths are only the seventh cause of preventable deaths in the USA:

[Cog]

[dissident]

Once again a fine example of skimping on security. You can bet your last dollar that no hijacker would be able to get into the cockpit of an El Al flight. Penny pinching corporate retards can't spare the coin to put locks on the freaking cockpit doors so any group can force their way in.

What those autistic legislators should be trying to ban instead of guns is money-driven stupidity in the system. I am not talking about throwing money around like Pancho Villa. I am talking about tight oversight where bureaucrats can't blow millions on junk that will never be use or implemented. We had this in Canada where the Federal government spent $2 billion on a computer system to implement the gun registry. This registry could have been deployed on a single laptop even every Canadian was registered.

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dissident', 'O')nce again a fine example of skimping on security.

[KaiserJeep]

When you define "mass shooting" as 4 or more victims, the number of mass shootings at public schools in the last three decades:

1980-1990, average of 85,260 public schools and 1 mass shooting (Stockton CA, Cleveland Elementary School, 1989), incidence 0.00117%
1990-2000, average of 88,906 public schools and 1 mass shooting (Littleton CO, Columbine HS, 1999), incidence 0.00112%
2000-2010, average of 96,045 public schools, and 2 mass shootings (Red Lake MN, Red Lake Indian Reservation School, 2005 and Nickel Mines PA, Nickel Mines Amish School, 2006), incidence 0.00208%

So far in this decade we have had 2 mass shootings in public schools (Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton Connecticut, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida). One more such incident before 2020, you could say that there is an increasing trend.

Note that I am not counting private schools (no records of any mass shootings) or colleges/universities (a different case).

Still, compared to a serious problem like (for example) opiod overdoses, these shootings are small potatoes. They garner a lot of the media attention because many of the victims are kids.

[Newfie]

Here is a weird take.....26 of 27 mass shooters were fatherless?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markmeckle ... ng-common/

[yellowcanoe]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '
')
Still, compared to a serious problem like (for example) opiod overdoses, these shootings are small potatoes.

[dissident]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vtsnowedin', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dissident', 'O')nce again a fine example of skimping on security.

[dissident]

In 2015 the US spent $36 billion to fight the war on drugs. There were 90,000 elementary schools operating that year.

Suppose we hire 4 security guards per school. That is 360,000 guards and pay them $100,000 each. We need $36 billion dollars.

According the climate change denier clown, the USA can't afford this.

[KaiserJeep]

It might be instructive to understand why there has never been a mass shooting at a private school. I personally have no idea, such kids would seem to be obvious targets.

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dissident', 'I')n 2015 the US spent $36 billion to fight the war on drugs. There were 90,000 elementary schools operating that year.

Suppose we hire 4 security guards per school. That is 360,000 guards and pay them $100,000 each. We need $36 billion dollars.

According the climate change denier clown, the USA can't afford this.

[Cog]

As VT and KJ have explained, mass shootings are statistically an insignificant source of death by gun or any other form of death.