1.It needs the widest possible exposure
2. It exposes the mindset of the pc mainstream media, and
3. This ageing blogster lacks the literary capabilities to improve upon it
Government More Likely to Kill Your Kids Than a School Shooter Is
By Thomas HochmannDecember 14th, 2013
In light of the sensationalist news coverage of yesterday's Arapahoe High School shooting, I thought it would be fun to look at some actual facts about school shootings. I know, I know... It's so old fashioned to resort to such inconvenient things as facts. Please forgive me for committing this grave sin against the journalistic standards of the 21st century.
First off, there are 132,656 K-12 schools in the US. From 2003 to date, there have been 76 shootings in US schools. 53 of those shootings resulted in deaths. Thus, over this 10 year period, the US has experienced an average of 5.3 fatal school shootings per year. Using these numbers, you can figure out that the odds that any given school will experience a fatal shooting during an entire calendar year are about 1 in 25,029.
Compare that figure that to the odds that you will die from:
- An air travel accident (1 in 20,000)
- Drowning (1 in 8,942)
- Electrocution (1 in 5,000)
- Falling down (1 in 246)
- Committing suicide (1 in 121)
- A car crash (1 in 100)
Schools don't have mandatory drowning drills (though death by drowning is twice as likely as experiencing a fatal school attack), or mandatory "how not to fall down" classes (100 times as likely), or mandatory "don't get in a car because you might die" drills (250 times). They don't even devote this much shock-and-awe theatrics to teaching kids about cancer, which has a 1 in 7 chance of killing you (3,575 times more likely than a fatal school shooting).
As a fun aside, it's worth noting that you have a 1 in 89 chance of being killed by your own government. That's right: it's 281 times more likely that your own government will kill you or your child than your child's school will experience a fatal gun attack.
Funny how the schools don't drill kids on how to evade the police or withdraw their consent from government, both of which are far more likely sources of death and destruction than any crazed civilian gunman.
1 comment:
I like the content and the direction but there seems to be a lacking of rigor. While the chances of being in a school shooting are as you describe, what you need to delineate is how likely you are to die in a school shooting. this would be a better comparison than just a general in a shooting that resulted in death. good, but you need to go deeper.
second, it's interesting to see a comparison to methods of death but I should point out I don't think all deaths are created equal as it were. A person who dies of cancer at the end of their life is much less concerning than a child who dies at the start of theirs. I once saw a study that looked at the number of years a person lost when compared to the averaged age of death and used that as a metric to compare the gravity of the type of death when related to the chance of occurrence. That, I think, would make for a much more compelling comparison though not nearly as digestible as the aforementioned figures.
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