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If you were to run for higher office in your country, what controversial thing would the vetting process uncover about you? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by vettnerk@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

First, despite there being multiple school shootings this year, school shootings are a tiny fraction of the overall homicides in the US

Which are also often committed with guns…

which are, in turn, dwarfed by the number of suicides committed with firearms.

I'm not talking about suicide.

Second, looking at your link you provided, you see a lot of things like, “A gun was fired during a fight near a basketball game at Appoquinimink High School. No injuries were reported”, and “Bullets struck two windows of classrooms at PS 78 in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island. One classroom was occupied by ten adults, but no bullets entered the classrooms” being counted as "school shootings:, which you then compare to Columbine. You are intentionally, and in bad faith, conflating entirely different things, and placing them all under the heading of, “firearms near schools”.

I did nothing of the sort. There are multiple bona fide school shootings in that list, such as the Michigan State shooting and the Covenant shooting.

It is relevant, because it has different causes, and is thus addressed differently.

That's not a meaningful answer. Let's have some details.

Are you willing to engage in good faith, or have you already decided that the only solution is banning firearms?

Are you willing to engage in good faith? So far, you've argued based on false premises (namely that school shootings are rare, and that there are no bona fide school shootings in the previously linked Wikipedia list) and evasive non-answers (namely that targeted violence at school is to be “addressed differently”, with no explanation of how). Doesn't seem like good faith to me.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

namely that school shootings are rare

No matter how you define "school shooting", they are rare. The total number of people killed in all shootings that occurred on school properties in 2022 was 40 people, over a total of 51 incidents (that number, BTW, includes suicides). This is in a country over 98,000 public schools (that does not include private schools), and 56M K-12 students.

Any way you want to look at it, that's rare. It's far more common than any other (western, 1st world) country, but it's still objectively a very, very rare occurrence; the odds of any single student dying in a school shooting--including suicides at school--in a single school year are under one in a million.

Once you start removing suicides, parents shooting each other in school parking lots over football games, and other similar incidents, and look only at mass-casualty events--where a person intentionally targeted students at a school in order to murder as many people as they could--your numbers go down even more.

that there are no bona fide school shootings in the previously linked Wikipedia lis

I didn't say that at all. I said that there were things on that list that do not fit the commonly-accepted definitions of "school shooting". When you say "school shooting", people hear Uvalde, or Newport. They don't think, "a bullet went through a school wall at 3am on a Saturday morning when no one was in class", or, "a cop shot himself in the leg" despite those being included on the list of "school shootings".

namely that targeted violence at school is to be “addressed differently”, with no explanation of how

Because I don't have the FBI report on mass casualty events at schools in front of me. But here's one, I'd suggest giving it a read. The things that motivate mass shooters can't be directly addressed by the kinds of things that are going to reduce ordinary violent crime; you need different approaches.

So no, you aren't engaging in good faith argument. You've already reached a conclusion.