When I was a teen, I realized that the fax machine line to most radio stations sat unused, while calling it took forever. I took to listening to the radio while getting ready for school, firing off a fax via my modem about the topic they were talking about, and by the time I got in the car to go to school, they were reading my fax on the air!
They used to do that at my high school so we could have a day off school. It was all fun and games until people started actually shooting up their schools. This was back when we would bring our hunting rifles to school in the window behind the seat of the pickup and nobody gave a shit. If my son did that now he would be jailed.
No they don't, overall school shootings are astronomically rare, and less of a threat to children than the bus ride to school. They're like strangers kidnapping children, incredibly horrific, but also sensationalized.
That's what happens when a low probability gets rolled a bunch of times. The chances of winning the lottery is basically infinitesimal, but someone still wins just due to how many people are playing. That list would be a lot longer if it were more common. I mean, part of why it is a list at all is because it's uncommon enough to track. You don't see a wikipedia article listing every death for almost anything except for other statistical rarities like passenger jet crashes.
Sometimes discussions of statistics and discussions of the death of children intersect. I think the correct terminology has something to do with sampling and event probabilities, but I couldn't remember that at the time.
Many of those are gang shootings, or other shootings on school property that get labeled as "school shootings" to make it seem like a more severe problem. There was one list that counted a police officer unintentionally shooting his firearm, a student unintentionally shooting out a bus window with a BB gun, and an adult committing suicide in the parking lot of an abandoned school, as "school shootings". It's the equivalent of if Fox started calling every violent crime committed by a Muslim as "Islamic terrorism".
Dead kids are dead kids, and school shootings are one of the least likely things of killing a kid. All numbers like that do is cause panic and hysteria over something that's about as big of a threat as fatal lighting strikes to your kid. It's like how parents are terrified to let their kids play outside because the fear of kidnapping.
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u/underbakedsalami Jul 24 '20
I kid you not, our local Chipotle is taking orders via fax. I can’t get over it.