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A Modest Kickstarter Proposal
In multiple domains, there is a reasonably strong consensus within the zeitgeist that negative mood affiliated media does not correlate to negative behavior. In fact, the opposite is often claimed, that proliferation of such media provides a substitute for the negative behavior, actually reducing it. Casual Ducking pulls up hundreds of articles, many in academic works, arguing that pornography (even aggressive/violent pornography) substitutes for real-world sexual assault, that generally violent video games substitute for real-world violent behavior, that fake child porn (or just sufficiently cheap, legal, and easy to access child porn) substitutes for real-world sexual abuse of children. Many people make these arguments and attach their real names and institutional affiliations to them.
On the other hand, casual Ducking for games where one is a school shooter doesn't elicit any similar list of names/affiliations calling for such a substitute. Instead, it appears to have been kinda-sorta tried and mostly just shut down. What accounts for the difference? Is there a theoretical argument for why it should have a different effect? Is there some sort of data which could be marshaled against the thesis? I don't have solid numbers for the actual cost of school shootings, but I have to imagine that if someone could set up a kickstarter (or whatever platform you'd need to use to not have the effort immediately banned by the platform) to create a school shooter video game, and if said game could provide even a weak substitute, it would be an incredibly efficient use of EA contributions.
This thought arose from watching the bodycam video of the heroic police officers that was posted below. It reminded me of actual first person shooters that I played back when I was young. In addition, the discussion of whether the shooter had a poor strategy for a loadout was interesting. Some blamed (or, um, I guess praised) FPSs for having a typical mechanic where you can carry multiple weapons essentially "for free". Would it make a difference if the video game was tailored to give players the wrong idea about what would be effective in such a situation? Or should it (and FPSs in general) move to being a more realistic simulation?
Finally, what was actually my first thought on the matter was a response to people praising the officers (especially in comparison to Uvalde). Pointing out that their behavior is something that society has strong and important reasons to encourage. I actually thought first, "What if you made a game that let you take on that persona, rushing into danger to save children at great risk to yourself?" But then, I ran into a conundrum. Would this version of the game actually encourage such behavior? Or would it substitute away from such behavior? "Yeah, I get the rush of going headlong into danger to save innocents plenty at home; no need to actually go out and do that in the real world"?
School shooters are so rare that it would be impossible to determine if any intervention had any kind of effect, unless it was very dramatic (like the number of school shooting went up by 10x or ceased completely).
According to Wikipedia there were 52 school shootings in the US in 2022 alone, and that's not even an outlier. Seems like if you could cut if down by 50% that would be pretty noticeable, though it would be tricky to prove a causal relationship.
How many of those were just gang violence being carried out on a school campus? There is a big difference between an inner city gang member killing a rival on campus vs a loner white kid going on a rampage.
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Hold on, that list is bullshit. Do you think any intervention aimed at reducing school shootings would prevent: "A sheriff's deputy teaching a vocational law enforcement class accidentally discharged his weapon, grazing a student"? I count 10 legitimate school shootings in that list, and I'm being generous. If it went from 10 to 5 in a year would it be noticed? I don't know, I would have to look at what the variance is, but probably not. Maybe if the effect was that large and all happened in the same year, you'd be able to tell.
10/year to 5/year is ... very noticeable. Just over a year, with shitty math, that'd be a one-tailed p value ("how probable is an outcome equal or more extreme") of .056. Over ten years, 100 -> 50 would be a p-value of 2.8665157187919333e-07.
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A more comprehensive cataloguing of these shootings by category (lone wolf terrorism vs gang related vs romance related vs accidental discharge etc), as well as by national news coverage, would contribute a lot to this discussion but I don't have time to trawl through 50+ incidents. From a cursory look at the 2020s list by no. of deaths I hadn't heard of any of the top ten besides Uvalde and Nashville, which I find odd.
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Unironically: that incident absolutely sounds like it could be resolved by better (any?) firearm safety training. Someone broke at least one of the fundamental rules, probably all of them, if a negligent discharge happened in a school and (almost) hit someone.
But you're absolutely right it's not the sort of thing people mean when they talk about stopping school shootings.
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