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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37996 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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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.

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.

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.

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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