What parents worry about vs what they should worry about

Sadly, the paranoia seems to be out of control. So much so that I take the commenter below ("a couple creepy incidents") with a grain of salt. Was it really something creepy or are kids taught to overreact when a stranger so much as says hello and the story got exaggerated in the telling?

It's ridiculous what I've seen parents describe as creepy. They just cannot get the image of a child predator out of their heads.

I know just the other day I watched a man in his late 30s/early 40s walk out of a supermarket with a 12-14yo girl who was clearly not his biological child (completely different ethnicity) and get into a car. I couldn't help but be just the slightest bit suspicious. I may have been right, I may have been wrong, but if it was a woman with a 12-14yo girl OR boy, not a single eyebrow would raise.

Even nows my cousin is extremely paranoid about her daughter. At 14, this girl wasn't even allowed to read Twilight; a tragedy, because the girl otherwise refuses to read.

You also nailed the real issue on the head - it's not that we don't need some sort of child protection services; it's that "you are at their mercy with little to no oversight".

You can control that risk in a vague, statistical fashion just by driving around less. Of course, you have to cost-benefit that against certain lifestyle choices, but there are actual tradeoffs that would be affected by this. For instance, the actual risk of a child getting abducted on public transit is probably a lot less than the risk of the child getting killed in a car accident, but most parents ignore the car accident risk and drive their kids around instead of letting them take the bus[1]/train/subway/monorail.

[1] Trains in particular, but even buses are likely safer--they're driven by professionals who tend to drive more slowly and conservatively. They also have a higher profile so other vehicles are more likely to see them, and on many buses, passengers are elevated above bumper height. It seems like an ordeal to get the statistics on buses together, though, so if it makes it more convenient for you to understand my point, you can just pretend I didn't mention anything about buses.

Drivers aged 16-19 have auto fatality rates four times higher than other drivers. That's not because they are magnets for middle aged drunk drivers.

1 in 4 teens killed in auto accidents were under the influence of alcohol.

Children are more likely to be molested by family members and friends of the family than by strangers. They are also more likely to die by stepping into the car of a friend than by being hit while driving alone. It's important to instill in your children the skills necessary to deal with the actual threats they are likely to encounter. Indeed, as a ridiculous example, if you told your children that they are not allowed to ride with friends but they are free to hitch-hike with random adult strangers chances are they'd actually be safer.

The other idea is that she means "school shootings" instead of snipers specifically.