• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Another School Shooting

Matthew Best said:
He said "mass school shootings", you changed it to "school shootings". That could be the source of your dispute.
Click to expand...

Bollocks it is. I'm disputing the use of the word 'rare'. More than zero in 8 months would count as far as I'm concerned, and there have been more than that, even if you want to restrict it to some definition of 'mass shooting' (there is no universally agreed one).

CNN says there have been 45 school shootings so far this year. https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index.html

CBS says over 200. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-many-school-shootings-2024-apalachee-winder-georgia/ (These larger numbers are due to a broader definition of 'shooting' https://www.allsides.com/story/fact...-how-many-school-shootings-have-happened-2024 )

This wikipedia page lists 3 mass school shootings so far this year. Again, I say that is not rare by most countries' definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2024
 
Fair enough. But why change the thing being counted? It wasn't necessary for the point you were making (as you've just ably demonstrated) so why do it without acknowledging that you were doing it?

You could have said "there have been three this year!" and that would have sufficed.
 
zooterkin said:
You need to get a better dictionary. There have been 23 school shootings in the USA just this year so far. Most civilised countries don't have any at all.
Click to expand...

There's a vast difference between a Colt Gray who wants to indiscriminately shoot up the school for mass carnage and a brawl between two students where one draws a gun. That's why I'm making the distinction between mass school schootings and just school shootings. The press doesn't really give a crap about simple school shootings.
 
It's also relevant to note that when "school shootings" are tabulated, they're collected irrespective if someone was actually shot. Any shooting on or near a school campus is recorded. These are not Colt Gray.
 
Trausti said:
There's a vast difference between a Colt Gray who wants to indiscriminately shoot up the school for mass carnage and a brawl between two students where one draws a gun. That's why I'm making the distinction between mass school schootings and just school shootings. The press doesn't really give a crap about simple school shootings.
Click to expand...

You say that as if it's normal and acceptable. It really isn't.
 
Ron Obvious said:
He's not. He's just saying there's a difference.
Click to expand...

No, since we seem to be picking nits in this thread, he's saying there's a vast difference. I disagree; in both cases, someone is wielding a gun in a school, a place where no gun belongs.
 
May I respectfully point out that the title of this thread is:

"Another School Shooting".

So moronic squawking about the definition of mass shooting is not required.

(Even though this is a popular distraction technique to try and stop people from talking about America's fetishization of guns.)
 
This thread has a post attempting to minimize school shootings below lightening strikes on the danger to children scale. That the poster was incorrect about which presents greater risk to children is not the most absurd part of that post.
 
I just saw a young (20s-ish) movie reviewer comment when someone in the movie mentioned going postal -- "Is that a thing?". It used to be, pretty much that was the only thing.
 
Trausti said:
There's a vast difference between a Colt Gray who wants to indiscriminately shoot up the school for mass carnage and a brawl between two students where one draws a gun. That's why I'm making the distinction between mass school schootings and just school shootings. The press doesn't really give a crap about simple school shootings.
Click to expand...

To the parent of a dead child, it's an almost non-existent difference. They're both symptoms of the same disease.
 
sarge said:
This thread has a post attempting to minimize school shootings below lightening strikes on the danger to children scale. That the poster was incorrect about which presents greater risk to children is not the most absurd part of that post.
Click to expand...

Lightning strikes and gun murders are just facts of life, waddya gonna do?
 
Trausti said:
Good grief. We're a vast country of 330M people. These events are rare. Before 1999 they weren't a thing (unless you don't like Mondays). It's so irrational not to view things proportionally.
Click to expand...

My earliest personal recollection of a rampage type school shooting that made the news - that students actually talked about, in school - was the Pearl, Mississippi shooting in 1997. Looking through the lists though, it looks like there had been one or two dozen shootings at schools by students in any given year for a while before that; you have to go back to the mid-eighties before the number dwindles to only half a dozen or so per year. The vast majority of these shootings were targeted though, and had small victim counts. There were rampage attacks at schools every couple of years, but they were usually committed by adults.

There were exceptions, however. For instance I've learned about this rampage from 1996, this rampage from 1992, and this rampage from 1988 which is disturbingly similar to Sandy Hook save for a much lower victim count. There were also a few other incidents where all of the ingredients of a school rampage were present, but the event didn't get any really big headlines because despite their best efforts the shooters managed to hit only one or two people, or none at all.

It's worth noting that around this same time, in 1995 the film The Basketball Diaries was released, which features a scene where the protagonist daydreams about committing a rampage shooting in one of his classrooms. Prior to that, 1992 the music video for the Pearl Jam song "Jeremy" was released. Originally, the end of the video would have shown a young child committing suicide with a gun in front of his class, but the imagery of the child pointing the gun at himself ended up being cropped out in order to appease MTV's violent-imagery restrictions; the remaining reaction scene, showing his classmates splattered with blood and recoiling, led most who saw the video to believe it was depicting a rampage shooting. So the idea of this sort of incident taking place did not just pop out of nowhere in 1997; it was definitely on people's minds at the time.
 
Last edited:
Trausti said:
Good grief. We're a vast country of 330M people. These events are rare. Before 1999 they weren't a thing (unless you don't like Mondays). It's so irrational not to view things proportionally.
Click to expand...

School-shootings.jpg


Taking your starting point of 1999, school shootings in the USA

1999 - 3 (18 killed 24 wounded)
2000 - 4 (6 killed)
2001 - 3 (5 killed, 13 wounded)
2002 - 3 (7 dead, 4 wounded)
2003 - 4 (8 killed, 3 wounded)
2004 - 2 (1 killed, 1 wounded)
2005 - 4 (13 killed, 11 wounded)
2006 - 7 (16 killed, 10 wounded)
2007 - 7 (41 Killed, 31 wounded)
2008 - 9 (17 killed, 25 wounded)
2009 - 4 (4 killed, 1 wounded)
2010 - 8 (10 killed, 6 wounded)
2011 - 5 (11 killed, 7 wounded)
2012 - 5 (41 killed, 8 wounded)
2013 - 8 (17 killed, 9 wounded)
2014 - 10 (15 killed, 10 wounded)
2015 - 12 (23 killed, 19 wounded)
2016 - 8 (12 killed, 13 wounded)
2017 - 8 (19 killed, 21 wounded)
2018 - 13 (42 killed, 47 wounded)
2019 - None
2020 - 8 (9 killed, 1 wounded)
2021 - 12 (16 killed, 8 wounded)
2022 - 21 (47 killed, 42 wounded)
2023 - 22 (37 killed, 28 wounded)
2024 - 11 (15 killed, 16 wounded)
--------------------------------------
TOTAL - 201 (420 killed, 358 wounded)


nothing_to_see_here_naked_gun.gif
 
Last edited:
Seriously, though, for a change... I'm not even going to comment about guns in general, but why does a 13 year old need access to them, or his own AR-15 as an xmas gift? (He's 14 now, but he got the gun last year.) I mean, I'm not even opposed to taking the kid to a shooting range if he's into it, but why does he need his own gun the rest of the time?
 
Last edited:
HansMustermann said:
Seriously, though, for a change... I'm not even going to comment about guns in general, but why does a 13 year old need access to them, or his own AR-15 as an xmas gift? (He's 14 now, but he got the gun last year.) I mean, I'm not even opposed to taking the kid to a shooting range if he's into it, but why does he need his own gun the rest of the time?
Click to expand...
The gun is a pacifier.
The father was being blackmailed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom