61–70 of 93 posts
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Law is not the only variable and is not deterministic. Social environment and cultural values are of great influence. The US media glorifies violence and yet censors the reality of it. How many of those other countries with stricter gun control laws have been involved in as many violent conflicts across the globe as the US?
The UK has invaded everywhere and has a total ban on handguns after the school shooting incident. (also, perhaps surprisingly to Americans, school trained me on guns at 14: http://atc.wikia.com/wiki/L98A2_Cadet_GP_Rifle )
https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-...
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Logically, it seems more practical to worry about things you can control, than those that you can't. "There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will." -Epictetus
I think you're underestimating yourself. I can control my own actions, so my worry about heart disease can inform my dietary choices. We can control gun violence by influencing culture or changing laws, so gun control is an appropriate subject of worry. We cannot control the sun going supernova. We shouldn't worry about that.
Shouldn't the comparison be made against school shootings world wide? Or at least be normalized for overall crime rate or something?
I 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…
Closest thing I can find to an accurate data-set is here: 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.
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The 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.
> 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 i…
Can 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.
I would argue heart disease being the leading cause of death in many 'developed' countries strongly indicates that we, as a society, do not have control over it.