Wednesday, February 28, 2018

School Shootings: Almost As Rare As Hen's Teeth

h/t Silicon Graybeard

Lightning strikes 400-500 people per year in the US, and kills 40-50 people
 annually, making it 4-5X more likely than dying in a school shooting.
 Facts are stubborn things.

SiG brings out the scientific reality about school shootings:
"According to the study, mass school shootings were more common in the 1990s than this decade.
Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.

“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.
On a per capita basis, over the past 25 years, "about 10 students per year" works out to 0.18 deaths per million students per year.  Looked at that way, it really is rather safe in schools.   

You know that often-repeated lie that there have been 18 school shootings so far this year?  Dr. Fox brings the truth:
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.

Of these, 8 are mass shootings, or incidents involving 4 or more deaths, excluding the assailant.
16 shootings in just over 21 years is a long way from 18 this year alone."
For Common Core math graduates, 0.18 deaths per million students is 0.000018%.
For Common Core parents, the death percentage among the homeschooled is 0.0000000000001%.
Just saying.
RTWT. It's a very good piece.
And you'll never see it on the MSM, even on Fox News.

Fox & Fridel's statistics are unassailable; their conclusive "logic" later in the piece is retarded.
Their reasons for what they don't like are purely hysterical responses, and their hopes for what they think would work better are purely projection and irrational wishful thinking.

Magical thinking is the sign of juvenile minds. In adults, it's a clinical psychosis.

The number-crunchers should stick to them, alone; critical thinking and higher reasoning is still evidently beyond their capability.

I'm not a fan of "making schools look like fortresses" either. I want them to be fortresses.
Disneyland already does this, with no harm to anyone's delicate psyche. It has walls, a moat, gates, and more cameras per square yard than (Formerly Great) Britain.
There are also about twenty times the number of armed guards, including cops, there per capita as there were at Parkland, even after the gunfire started there. Because Disney knows that if you put them there before the shooting, you don't have to deal with one at all.

As for scaring kids, "Duck & Cover" was just a thing you did like a fire drill; I could give two sh*ts for the frail, feeble 2 out of 200,000 that will be emotionally scarred, if it saves a thousand times that the rest of their lives.

Kids already know they "have a target on their backs" 24/7/365; "Stranger Danger" and so on have been drummed into them since before Kindergarten Cop was a runaway hit movie, twenty-seven years ago. The kids in that movie have kids old enough to go to Parkland High School now.

Hollywood gave you the solution to school security waaaay back in 1990:
put an armed Terminator in the classroom. Worked then, works now.

And FFS, it's a school; their whole job there is to educate kids on how the world is, and works, so they can deal with it.
If Fox/Fridel think that's no place to teach kids the right way about things that could save their lives, whereinhell do they think they should learn them? The Emergency Room and ICU after there's a bullet hole in their liver??

Pointy-headed liberal academics gonna Stupid; it's what they do. The fact that we're all pleasantly aghast that they didn't fake the numerical data (cf. Anthropogenic Globull Warming shenanigans) this time out tells you everything about the state of statistics you need to know.

Good survey, idiot conclusions.

The authors can expect to be sent to the re-education gulag for their failure to maintain The Narrative, in short order. Academic Siberia is every bit as cold and lonely as the geographical one, as they'll find out any minute.

3 comments:

SiGraybeard said...

In a way, Fox & Fridel's lack of sense about what to do reinforces the study and makes it more valid. It proves beyond a doubt they don't have a right wing bias.

So even if such doctrinaire leftists as these two say there's no big crisis with school shootings, maybe we can have just a little sense about how to handle it.

Trump made all the blood drain out of my face when he said, "take their guns first. Due process takes too long". But don't California, Oregon and a handful of other states do that already? They let anybody turn in a neighbor or friend for being unstable, the state takes their guns and then the slow wheels of "due process" turn?

You know how the legal escalation over harming children made allegations of abuse a regular feature of 75% of all divorces? Same thing will happen with guns and allegations of "not being all there". Not to mention a regular feature of disputes between neighbors.

Aesop said...

They definitely don't have a right-wing bias, but also no brains, or much integrity.
Their conclusions are unscientific codswallop.

They could have simply stuck with the data, and left things as they are, without trying to try to make their obvious political conclusions sound like they have some basis in science.

I'm a big fan of science.
Philosophical scienceism in support of communism, not so much.
Howmany shooting there've been is numbers; how to prevent them is policy far outside the realm of scientific inquiry, which is why they should have taken Will Rogers' advice, and not passed up "a good opportunity to shut up."

As for Trump, his comment has been drastically taken out of context; he was referring to people making statements like the shooter did about wanting to be a "professional school shooter" and being dealt with proactively. He wasn't making a blanket policy statement, which is the impression you'd get from the 2-second attention-span crowd on our side.
I'm not saying I agree with him even in that limited context, but it isn't as what it's being spun.

CA does no such pro-active grabs.
If you want my further take on that nonsense, scroll back ten days or so:
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/02/pre-crime.html

billrla said...

Most people have no idea what "due process" means. However, everyone knows what "going to collections" means. Going to collections is the same thing as due process. Going to collections is the process you go through when your bills are due. Did I get that right? Hope so, 'cause I'm thinking of running for office, or maybe, being a constitutional lawyer.