this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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If only...
According to a quick search I could only find 2 cases of tornadoes hitting US schools in the last 25 years, giving an average of about 1 school tornado hit per 12 years. I believe it's fair to say that was overblown.
However, in the same 25 years there have been over 400 school shootings in the US, meaning there is an average of about 1 school shooting per month. I'd say that's a pretty reasonable fear.
Also one is an "act of god" while the other is entirely man-made. Keep the thought and prayers for the one god is actually responsible for.
There's no way that figure holds up. For tornadoes I mean.
It could be that many tornados have been near schools, (justifying the drills), but only that many have actually hit the schools (which would be catastrophic without the drills)
That's possible. I think where the data goes astray is the severity of the tornado. Like in other words, I bet tornadoes are hitting schools all the time but it's hardly more than a strong wind.
Like just from a quick Google search, there are about 1,200 tornadoes a year in the United States. And there have been days that have had record tornadoes of like 100 tornadoes per day. And I know, at least as of a few years ago, there were quite a few areas of the country where there are huge gaps in radar coverage.
It's just that it's not really anyone's job to count how many schools get hit by tornadoes. It's kind of like how with dog bites, it's not anyone's job to record the breed, so the data ends up being a total crap shootn and nobody really has any idea.
And that figure is inflated. The School Shootings That Weren't https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent
When people hear "school shootings" they imagine events like Columbine, even when that's not what's being counted. Literally every time a gun is fired at a school regardless of circumstances, it's a school shooting. This includes cases where nobody is injured, the event happens after hours, or the people involved are unaffiliated with the school. Seriously, the NPR article I linked mentions a case where a guy killed himself in the parking lot of a building owned by the school district (that had not had students in it for years). That counted as a school shooting.
The sort of event people imagine IS more common than tornadoes, and even stupid, unrelated incidents that result in injuries is ALSO more common than tornadoes. The fact remains that there are not 400 Columbines a year. The chances of a particular student dying of any violent means on school property is vanishingly small. People worried about their kids getting killed in a school shooting should also worry about meteor and lightning strikes.
It's insane that a gun is even fired off in school that often. What circumstances could make that OK
It isn't OK, every single case is a crime.
There was a newsworthy incident where a cop managed to pull off a negligent discharge. Nobody got hurt, but guess what? Still a school shooting.
I think that's happened more than once. And at least once was captured on video and put on YouTube. It has to do with trigger "safeties" such as on Glocks which increase the possibility of a negligent discharge. Were I a warrior who likely would be in a situation where their lives depended on getting a quick shot off, I'd consider a pistol with a trigger safety. But not otherwise.
So what? Still proves that your comparison to tornado drills is, well, utterly ridiculous and without merit...
Not ridiculous, the odds of either event injuring or killing any particular individual are vanishingly small. A person who worries about school shootings should be positively terrified of climbing ladders or crossing a busy road.
People are really bad at contextualizing risk. Just look at the "stranger danger" scare.
You’ve moved the goalpost from “odds of happening” to “odds of injury or death”.
I’m sure you’ll move it to “physical injury” when it’s pointed out that a single school shooting has major and long lasting effects on children’s mental health, even if they themselves never even see the shooter.
Clearly I wasn't using the figures in that article because I said it was 400 over 25 years, not 240 in a single year. Even in that article they say they were able to confirm at least 12 shootings in that year, supporting my estimated average of 1 per month.
Also children don't have to be actually shot to be traumatized by a shooting. The number of children affected by school shootings is thousands of times higher than the number of injuries or deaths.
The children have nothing to fear because it’s actually illegal for bullets to miss their intended target.