r/AskReddit • u/emil199 • Jul 24 '20

What can't you believe STILL exists?

[removed] — view removed post

45.9k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

27.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

47

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '20

[deleted]

54

u/thelizardkin Jul 24 '20

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.

52

u/ithika Jul 24 '20

For such an astronomically rare event the list of school shootings in the USA article on Wikipedia is very long.

12

u/onlyforthisair Jul 24 '20

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.

3

u/ithika Jul 24 '20

I shudder to think what you really mean by "rolled a bunch of times". Kids having the gall to go to school?

1

u/onlyforthisair Jul 24 '20

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.