Schools are safer than they were in the 90s | Hacker News Reader

Schools are safer than they were in the 90s

news.northeastern.edu

75 pointsSoMuchToGrok90 comments

Can someone say "Security Theater"?

In cases like these I like to take the Freakonomics formula for risk, that outrage factors more into observed risk than actual danger.

We're more worried about Terrorism than Heart Disease, even as we have far more control over the latter.

I like to ask my "ban the AR-15" friends how they feel about the TSA.

Why?

I agree that much of what the TSA does is security theater, but... at least we got that? It shows that we as a society cared enough to "put on a show" of protecting ourselves from terrorism.

I welcome more research on effective ways to reduce gun violence, but unfortunately ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment_(1996) ) researchers have been prevented from doing so.

The clear, most effective way to reduce gun violence is to reduce the number of guns. (cf. every other developed nation.) However, the current interpretation of the 2nd amendment seems to make that difficult.

It's precisely because we have far more control over heart disease that we do not fear it.

I can accept getting heart disease—maybe it was my fault?—much more readily that being actively, senselessly, killed by someone else. Terrorists know this too, which is why definitionally terrorism is meant to induce fear by way of its unpredictability.

You wrote "security theater" to imply that we shouldn't attempt to address terrorism and school shootings because they don't kill enough people. I think that we ought to fund research into good, effective, ways to reduce gun violence _because_ it's something that we don't control ourselves.

Logically, it seems more practical to worry about things you can control, than those that you can't.

"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will."

-Epictetus

This is undoubtedly true on an individual level, but not necessarily true on a societal level.

(i.e. Things I can't control as an individual, we as a society might still be able to control or influence.)

I think you're underestimating yourself.

I can control my own actions, so my worry about heart disease can inform my dietary choices.

We can control gun violence by influencing culture or changing laws, so gun control is an appropriate subject of worry.

We cannot control the sun going supernova. We shouldn't worry about that.

Good point. Judging from history though, law has been quite unsuccessful at preventing the problem of murder.

Terrorism and gun violence is and has always been about economic impact. 9/11 had more concentrated economic impact than heart disease ever will.

If you think people are being overly emotional over these issues try to imagine a plausible reason why.

>9/11 had more concentrated economic impact than heart disease ever will.

And that was because of the misguided emotional response (i.e. invading countries which had nothing to do with it), not because of the event itself.

I would argue heart disease being the leading cause of death in many 'developed' countries strongly indicates that we, as a society, do not have control over it.

We don't, or we can't? As a country, we can do things to force people to avoid the risk factors and take mitigating actions.

I think the fact that you can bloat up to any weight you want just like how you can have as many kids as you want represent how primitive our civilization really is.

We are incredibly ineffective at doling out scarce resources or pricing in externalities.

I just don't expect humanity to get a handle on it for another 100 years at least. I'd say that, right now, we can't.

> we can do things to force people to avoid the risk factors and take mitigating actions.

Just like we forced people to stop drinking during prohibition, and we force petty criminals all the time to stop doing bad stuff once caught?

We'd like to think it's the former ("we can, but we don't"), but the reality is we can't.

What you're saying is that we should be giving up many human lives every year to maintain the status quo?

it’s unlikely that any of them will prevent mass school shootings

“The thing to remember is that these are extremely rare events, and no matter what you can come up with to prevent it, the shooter will have a workaround,” Fox said, adding that over the past 35 years, there have been only five cases in which someone ages 18 to 20 used an assault rifle in a mass shooting.

this seems weak. if shootings are rare events stopping one would make a considerable difference. just because assault rifles were rarely used in past 35 years in what way does that influence a future projection? What if we had a Vegas type event around a school? I don't really understand the thesis here

The problem is that because it is such a rare event, efficacy of any intervention is extremely hard to evaluate. So essentially whatever you do is guesswork.

To put it simply: how's do you know if whatever you did has an effect instead of the numbers being a result of a random downswing?

(You can know if you can know by employing Bayesian statistics - with these low rates you really cannot.)

well what about the idea that other countries adjusted their laws after such incidents and it made a difference in crime statistics?

I hate guns and I want them banned in America. But, crime goes up after gun bans https://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-...

I am okay with that because it spreads the violence but each instance of violence is less deadly. So for the sake of no school schootings, I will accept increase in general violence. Let's repeal the 2A.

Misleading graph! https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40697/did-the-u...

"Tthere are notes about anomalous events included in each year's numbers. Since the numbers are so low these can throw the graph off. In particular two large events which happened in previous years were reported for 2003 and 2017 respectively which accounts for their anomalous spikes.

    2003 includes 172 victims of Dr Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in history. While these killings happened over 25 years, they're recorded for 2003.
    2017 includes 96 victims of Hillsborough which happened in 1989.

The data notes other large, anomalous events are noted which can explain spikes in individual years.

    2001 includes 58 Chinese nationals who suffocated in a lorry en route into the UK.
    2004 includes 20 cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay.
    2006 includes 52 victims of the 7 July London bombings.
    2011 includes 12 victims of Derrick Bird."

I would also add that that data is for England and Wales, which excludes both Scotland's notorious history of stabbings and the three thousand deaths in Northern Ireland throughout the Troubles, prior to 1997. Some of which were using Armalite AR-18 rifles, as made famous by the murals.

You'd have to collect the guns for it to be effective. There are over 300 million generally unregistered firearms in private possession today, that might get a little tricky.

Any sensible implementation would be a phasing-out rather than a single sharp transition. It's not going to be like Sweden changing which side of the road they drove on overnight.

>Any sensible implementation would be a phasing-out rather than a single sharp transition

Many Americans already believe that gun control legislation is part of a program to phase out gun ownership and undermine the Second Amendment - and that's why they're stockpiling guns in expectation of an inevitable civil war. It's never going to not be tricky in the US.

Anything approaching what the rest of the world considers "sensible" gun control in the US would first need a massive cultural shift to take place, or an acceptance of protracted guerilla warfare as a consequence.

Other countries are not defined by the idea that people have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Europe is of course defined by the ECHR rights to life, liberty, and so on. This does not include "the pursuit of happiness" but it's not really clear how the school shootings help with that.

First, Europe is not a country.

Second, the ECHR mainly concerns itself with the "duty of states" to protect life, not the people's right to life itself.

Here is Article 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_2_of_the_European_Conv...

It is relatively recent that courts have even rules on this, primarily with McCaan v UK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCann_and_Others_v_United_Kin...

In the US, the right to life and liberty supersedes the right to safety. Based on the founding documents, Americans, because they are HUMANS, are born with the right to protect their lives and to pursue happiness. There is no right to safety (as there is no "RIGHT TO HAPPINESS") as safety would be something that OTHERS would have to provide YOU. Nothing that others must provide you can be a right.

https://twitter.com/CoyoteToledo/status/966832602383552513

   US: I'm on fire 
   CANADA: jump in the water 
   US: water won't work, i need more fire 
   UK: we used water when we caught fire 
   US: it won't work for us we like fire too much 
   US: I'm burning 
   AUSTRALIA: here is a video of water putting out fire 
   US: *stuffs fire in pockets*

Actually crime rates in Australia and the USA decreased similarly in the period following Australia's gun ban, despite America's inaction.

Overall crime rate in the US (everywhere?) has decreased since the 1970s or so. There is speculation it had to do with lead paint.

There has not been a single "mass shooting" in Australia since the gun ban. In the US, mass shootings decreased after the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, and then increased after it expired 2004.

List of Australian mass shootings since the gun ban https://i.redd.it/i0ovzrr4bgj01.jpg

> CANADA: jump in the water

Canada has a comparably high-rate of gun ownership and yet a substantially lower murder rate. I've seen plenty of pissing and moaning on firearm forums about their restrictions, more severe than the US', but one could reasonably carry out a massacre up there just as much as one can in the states.

It's not the guns. It's us.

Our most right wing national newspaper did a look at many mass shootings in the US and how that same scenario would play out in Canada. The overall conclusion is that not all the shootings could have been prevented by Canadian firearms laws, but many would have been. Interesting read.

http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/would-canadian-gun-laws-...

That's a great article, but something has me doubt that a lot of the "probably not" incidents would have been stopped is that they often hinge on the RCMP having a mere suspicion.

> The shooter, army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, had been investigated by federal authorities for links to terrorism. This would likely be enough for the RCMP to restrict his ability

When a PAL is denied, does one have the right to appeal or is that the final word on the matter? In the US the NICS background check has something similar, the Delay. If, in the course of your FFL background check, the Feds think you're up to something they issue a Delay which can be followed up with a Deny or the go-ahead to sell the firearm. One can appeal a Deny, however there is no way of handling a Delay which is particularly annoying since something as benign as having a similar name to a known criminal can result in one.

Also, how come the incidence of these types of shootings are so much lower in other parts of the world if there is no policy that will help prevent them?

Law is not the only variable and is not deterministic. Social environment and cultural values are of great influence.

The US media glorifies violence and yet censors the reality of it.

How many of those other countries with stricter gun control laws have been involved in as many violent conflicts across the globe as the US?

The UK has invaded everywhere and has a total ban on handguns after the school shooting incident.

(also, perhaps surprisingly to Americans, school trained me on guns at 14: http://atc.wikia.com/wiki/L98A2_Cadet_GP_Rifle )

This discussion is framed around recent decades, not centuries. The US has been far more violent than the UK on the world stage in recent decades.

Excellent question. There can be many factors, among them: - base rate of violent crime in general being lower - lack of access to guns - higher vigilance of school teachers - more mixed rather than segregated environments - more parental oversight and awareness of issues with children - less stressful environment

> Also, how come the incidence of these types of shootings are so much lower in other parts of the world if there is no policy that will help prevent them?

Well, the short answer is that deaths from incidents like this are actually more common, considerably more common, in some other parts of the developed world[0]. The majority of U.S. mass shootings result in no deaths, the overwhelming majority result in one or fewer. Only about 70 of the 474 or so mass shootings in 2017 were also classifiable as "mass murders" (single incidents resulting in four or more unjustified killings).

[0]: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/...

> if shootings are rare events stopping one would make a considerable difference. just because assault rifles were rarely used in past 35 years in what way does that influence a future projection? What if we had a Vegas type event around a school? I don't really understand the thesis here

The thesis is that you ought not make expensive, likely unconstitutional policy goals based on a fantasy about stopping a type of crime which happens less than once every seven years (in a country that is several times larger than the next most populous developed country), based on an unlimited attack on all risk.

The projected effect of this policy is so low, in fact, that it could just as easily cause more deaths, youth deaths even, than we expect it to limit; and there's a good chance that the policy will do essentially nothing at all, even for the limited cases it applies to.

added: If all risks are worthy of unlimited policy resources, I hereby declare that all children should be driven to school in Caterpillar 797s, to avoid the problems of pedestrian collisions and deadly vehicular collisions.

The thesis is that, because these events are so rare, the cost of prevention outweighs the benefit.

Yes, it sounds cold, but human life has a certain value, and just like any rational decision, we have to consider in some objective manner whether conceivable preventative measures are worthwhile.

>just because assault rifles were rarely used in past 35 years in what way does that influence a future projection

Do you not normally make decisions regarding the future based on observed past data?

The prevention is not free of costs either. Suppose access to guns is limited. An argument can be masse that since fewer people know how to deal with gunmen they will be less able to defend themselves from one so the shooting will be more massive. (I concede it is a weak argument.)

Likewise the argument can be made that there might be psychological results from drills like the ones used to allegedly prepare kids.

So the point you are trying to make is that it's worth giving up a few human lives every year to maintain the status quo?

As a society we make decisions like this all the time. How about cars?

Cars provide a much more useful function to society.

Alcohol and tobacco don't.

How is it that people are so convinced that guns serve no purpose other than murder of innocent children? This isn't just about obstinately maintaining some "status quo" out of spite for one political party. Guns are tools, and the vast majority of gun owners use them responsibly and more often to positive effect.

Let's put it this way: how many incidents of violence did you NOT hear about because simply brandishing a gun was enough to diffuse a situation or deter a would be criminal?

Please do not presume that this is some black and white issue where simply banning guns would solve all problems with gun violence. The implication that 2A supporters are all psychotic "gun nuts" who choose guns over innocent lives is a slanderous , oversimplified strawman, which only serves to further entrench divisiveness.

Please don't assume that everyone who disagrees with you is a gun-hating person. I own several firearms, that I use for sport and hunting. I am in favor of making it harder for people to purchase guns. Most people don't actually need firearms. Funny how humans have made it several hundreds of thousands of years without them, and have managed to protect themselves and hunt food. They are a tool, but an extremely powerful tool in the wrong hands.

Why is it that we require tens of hours of training in order to operate a car, and just a few more to drive bus loads of people, but require absolutely nothing to purchase a tool capable of inflicting just as much, if not more, damage? That's fucked up.

>Since 1996, there have been 16 multiple victim shootings in schools, or incidents involving 4 or more victims and at least 2 deaths by firearms, excluding the assailant.

17.

Literally happening just as this was posted: https://www.wxyz.com/news/police-responding-to-reports-of-sh...

Edit: Actually this may or may not meet the definition since their definition requires 4 or more casualties. Still.

IIRC there was a wave of school shootings in 1992-96, almost a dozen total; Columbine was the worst of them in terms of casualties, but in some ways just the culmination of a pattern. I don't know why you would start counting _after_ 1996.

New York was putting metal detectors into schools in the 1980's. They were for gangs, but I guess a school shooting is a school shooting.

I can only imagine the level-headed discussions this is going to spark.

Perhaps they should do a case control study - places that had mass shootings vs places that didn’t? I’m pretty sure there have been no mass shootings at gun shows or gun clubs, I wonder if there might be some relationship there worth exploring?

Interestingly the NRA national convention reduces gun injuries everywhere else: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-28/for-these...

"In relative terms, the decline is small -- accounting for one fewer injury for every 300,000 Americans."

But there are 1,100 times as many Americans.

"The difference in his study amounts to a reduction of several hundred injuries per convention per year"

Shouldn't the comparison be made against school shootings world wide? Or at least be normalized for overall crime rate or something?

The numbers are so tiny that comparisons are pretty much irrelevant. Since 1996 there have been just 8 mass k-12 shootings (incidents involving 4 or more school deaths, excluding the assailant), in a nation of 330 million people.

That's so far into small numbers territory that any comparisons are guaranteed to be overwhelmed by noise.

> incidents involving 4 or more school deaths

That number seems suspicious; you'd get a very different answer if your criterion was "any gunshot wound at a school", for example. But that definition might be a better match for what people think of as a school shooting.

(e.g. Northern Ireland had a very large number of terrorist attacks where a warning was given allowing evacuation - would they not count as terrorist incidents even if nobody was killed? I suspect not)

Any gunshot would at a school probably includes a very different pattern of behavior. If someone wants to murder (or maim) a specific person, or small group of people, they may carry that out with a gun, because it's expedient, but might switch to a knife if guns aren't available. If someone wants to murder (or maim) a large number of people, guns or explosives are really the only practical means; mass knifings have happened, but are even more rare than mass shootings.

When making a decision as to whether something is small, large, or tiny one needs a scale. What's the scale here? For example, if the rest of the world combined has had 12 mass k-12 shootings, then American accounts for 40% of the total shootings which is a huge fraction. So in my original question I was trying to find the right scale.

Edit: In a comment below, this article was linked https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-.... Indeed, on this scale we see a very different picture!

Why? That would seem to pick up lots of factors unrelated to the issue of school shootings in the United States.

https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-...

I have seen those studies pop up from time to time on HN with conclusions altering between "it's reachin worrying proportions", "there is an increase", "there is no increase", "they are so rare as to not worth considering".

From what I understand, the decision of what kinds of shootings are included has a large influence on the conclusion - e.g., the "there have been 18 shootings in 2018 so far" articles from a while ago used a comparatively low threshold for inclusion.

The threshold for this study seems to be "4 or more victims", which I think is similar to the threshold official publications used at the beginning of the Obama administration. I believe there were complaints that the threshold is unreasonably high which caused it to be adjusted - however, I don't have any sources for that ready, so if anyone knows more, please correct me.

In any case, it's important to look at the criteria if one wants to compare those studies.

It's not clear to me why this study would set those thresholds for the underlying data (4+ Victims & 2+ deaths), this seems to downplay the number of incidents. At the very least there should be some explanation of why this limit is in place, as it has a significant impact on the findings.

Closest thing I can find to an accurate data-set is here: https://www.kaggle.com/ecodan/us-school-shootings-dataset/no.... Data seems to be a blend of a northwestern study and the wikipedia list of shootings.

Absolutely. Even if there is some research question by which this criterion would be useful, it doesn't lead the underlying conclusions that school shootings in general are a rare event, declining in frequency.

Interestingly, according to [1], the criterion used by the FBI to assess mass shooting used to be "at least 4 persons killed or wounded" - until it got changed to "at least 3 persons" in 2013. So the criterion the study uses is stricter than both the old and the new way of counting the FBI uses.

Note also that, according to [2], even though the rate of mass shooting at schools seems to be decreasing, the rate of mass shootings in general is increasing.

See also [3] for more information about the different definitions and ways of counting.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting

[2] https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-study-200...

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/02/anothe...

Help, I cannot find the actual study (paper). It's referenced (in this article) as:

James Alan Fox and Emma E. Fridel, "The Three R's of School Shootings: Risk, Readiness, and Response," in H. Shapiro, ed., The Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education: Forms, Factors, and Preventions

But from Wiley's listing of papers in this volume (https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Wiley+Handbook+on+Violence+i...) the only article written by Fox and Fridel is called "The Menace of School Shootings in America: Panic and Overresponse".

Maybe it was renamed since?

Why don't they have the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007?

This data seems to be missing what a lot of people would call "school shootings".

I think this is k-12 only data

Based on a variety of comments here, I was curious about how many mass shootings there have been over the years. Mother Jones had a list that looked pretty good (well cited). I put it into a graph, which I think makes it a lot easier to understand.

Reasonable additions to this might be adding a line for type of weapon used.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mwNeZ_KHL_nLd85eOeI-...

Compared to the US in the past schools are safer, but in terms of school killings compared to those in other nations, the US is still ridiculously high.

https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-...

Can we get the word 'american' inserted in the title. It's a very local problem.

Personally not sure I care about a 90s baseline at all.

And most relevantly, the difference now is access to information anywhere/everywhere and in more detail/angle/opinion without a lot of latency.

This is garbage.

A drop in the number of deaths might just demonstrate an improvement in emergency medical procedures.

Analysis of two decades in the UK, where in 1997 they banned video games and mental illness:

    1996: 16 children and their teacher shot dead
    1997-2018: 0 shot dead

How does a nation ban mental illness?

And I'm pretty sure the UK still has video games?

That's what I thought as well but cannot confirm.

Sorry, it was a reference to some people claiming the causes of gun sprees are video games or mental illness.

In fact in 1997 the UK simply banned handguns.

Gotcha, my bad, did not realize the post was sarcasm.

Thanks for the clarification, I also did not realize the sarcasm.

whoosh

(original post is obviously sarcasm: the UK banned handguns.)

I take your point but, prior to Dunblane, I believe there was one death and 4 injuries in school shootings. All with shotguns.

I have a suspicion that the handgun ban and the lack of subsequent school shootings might not be completely causal.

BTW that's not to suggest that the ban was wrong. I was entirely supportive and still am. I think the UK's approach to guns is laudable and should be encouraged elsewhere.

Analysis of nearly two decades in the US where they banned planes and Muslims:

2001: 2,996 people killed in plane attacks

2002-2018: 0 people killed in plane attacks

The data they use in the study, don’t match the data gathered by the community.

There is a clear upward-trend since the 60’s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_...

First I'm not sure that is a good source. We have no idea if this list is vetted. Second, just because there is an increase in volume doesn't necessarily mean an increase in rate.

I'd it a trend though? Or is it just reporting accuracy? Perhaps just scaled to population it is constant?

A Wikipedia list does not answer any of those questions.

I looked through that list, and once you filter out the non-school deaths, it seem to line up with the article.

For example, Rancho Tehama Reserve, California is listed as six deaths, but that was a shooter who killed five adults at other locations, then fired at a locked down school, injuring one student, before killing himself. So zero students killed. There are quite a few like that in the list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com