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Did you read the report? The 6 journalists were the 4 slain in Annapolis and the 2 killed by a falling tree. Khashoggi was killed in Istanbul, not the US.

> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

He referred to the report referenced in the article, not the article itself. Seems like a fair question; I don’t chase down citations often.

Yeah, I might have deserved that one.

Massive brain fart on my end; edited my comment to remove that confusion. Although, maybe the framing of the article contributed to my error. Another top-level comment in this thread seems to have the impression that Khashoggi was part of the American tally, though he wasn't.

Dangerous is not a "value judgement." A country where journalists may feel intimidated to death because crazy men with guns are angry about their duty of reporting (with one incident in 2015 also) is a pretty dangerous place to do responsible, non-corruptible reporting, period. The feeling left hanging in the air is that the situation can worsen with the years as wackos multiply themselves.

Two events caused 6 deaths in the US (one event is a non-factor if you don't do hurricane reporting). Zero deaths in China, but 60 journalists were detained. If you were a journalist, in which country would you feel safer and more capable of doing your work with integrity? What about Egypt? Still no deaths, fewer detainees.

"Death count" is a fact, "dangerous" is more up for interpretation. NBC used the latter word that the report did not use, and "dangerous" and "deadly" are not interchangeable.

Why is China the base line? So if X is worse in China then all is great, let's point at China.

China doesn't have to be the baseline. I'm trying to say that NBC News was dishonest in its use of the word "dangerous." Don't want to use China? What about Egypt? Or what about Russia? zero deaths, zero jailed, zero hostages. Think that Russia is a less dangerous place to do journalism than the United States?

I have my answer, but I could see you having a different answer based on how you view the populaces and governments and the US as well as the kind of journalism that you want to do. Thus, "dangerous" is a value judgment, compared to "deadly", which is the term the original report used.

Why not have the baseline to be zero deaths, then if you prefer you can add more dimensions like journalists arrested etc, then we can create a metric and maybe you can find one where you can rank China and Russia over US but you still have US rank over the countries with no kills and no arrests.

Your point seems to be a "what about" China/Russia or other extreme country.

I think you're missing my point. NBC's headline is deceptive: there is no "most dangerous countries" list in the cited report. Furthermore, using the word dangerous is far more subjective than "deadly", which is made evident by the fact that we seem to disagree on what constitutes a dangerous country. My comparisons to other countries is trying to make the point that you can be a country with zero everything and still be more "dangerous" than a country that experienced a mass shooting and a hurricane. This is why I object to NBC News conflating the two words and suggesting that the US is more dangerous than it is.

Also, how realistic is a baseline of zero deaths?

>Least likely to die on the job were people in sales, with fewer than 2 deaths per 100,000, and management, with about 2 ½.[0]

Those two salesmen probably weren't murdered, they probably fell down the stairs in the office or were hit by a car crossing the street. This could have happened to a journalist or two this year as well in addition to what's in this report. But while zero deaths is a noble goal, I don't think it's a useful baseline for the profession of journalism. No job has zero hazards.

[0]: http://www.safebee.com/health/most-and-least-dangerous-jobs-...

You still ignore the countries where 0 journalists were killed by an angry person because of that they wrote or represent.

I agree US is not as dangerous as China,Russia etc but is more dangerous then the rest of the countries, you want to draw a base line somewhere above US "danger" level ,(again keep in mind this is a global comparison of journalists that died at work not random accidents)

I'm not ignoring it. 0 journalists were killed in Russia this year (at least not in a way that made this list).

Does one incident resulting in 4 deaths constitute a trend? how many journos were killed in the US in years past? What about other countries that were at zero this year? This year's report shows a zero for France, but as another commenter reminded me, Charlie Hebdo had 12 people killed (7-8 could be called "journalists" if you count copy editors and cartoonists) just under 4 years ago. What did that shooting say about the danger of being a journalist in France, and did that constitute a trend? Which country is more dangerous - France or the US?

It's a value judgment. This is my point.

But if 4 journalists were killed in other country would you made same point? I agree "dangerous" is not well defined here , still is a correct fact that US was on top and that compared to other civilized countries in US you can have 1 journalists upsetting 1 person and that causing all persons in the journal building got killed, this could include journalists that did not wrote any "controversial" articles.

So we can debate the meaning of dangerous or if we need 1% of jorunalists to be killed before you consider it a dangerous job but IMO the fact that as a journalists I and my colleagues could get killed with heavy guns because some person is upset is dangerous/risky compared to other countries (maybe compared to US is more dangerous to be a student)

"Trend" is also a word that doesn't appear in TFA.

North Korea had zero journalists killed.

Matt Taibbi has just written an entire book on the media called, what else - Hate Inc - taibbi.substack.com - you can easily see how much the media itself is responsible for stirring the pot.

As Charlie Hebdo case shows, no country is immune to angry people with guns.

Still, if you compare with other countries it is still dangerous to write something bad about some person because in US even known people with mental or behavior issues can get their hands on powerful guns. So relative to other US professions maybe is as dangerous but relative to other countries it is on the top of the list.

Also a president with mental issues uses his powerful position to call the press “the enemy of the people”. Then his mentally unstable followers send bombs or get their hands on assault weapons.

>Could argue that mass shootings feel systemic in the US, but not mass shootings targeting journalists.

I would argue that mass shootings in the US are a very good reason not to raise any kids here or send them to school here, considering many of those shootings were in schools, and many schoolchildren (or college students) have died in those shootings. In fact, I'd say students are the one group that should be most worried about mass shootings, just judging by evidence.

This comment takes us off-track a bit, but:

~130,000 K-12 schools in the US, public and private[0]

94 "gun violence" incidents in schools in 2018[1]. This is "each and every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week" - so far more broad than mass shootings alone.

Let's say each incident happened at a different school: that's a 0.072% chance that something happens with a gun at your school in a year. If those numbers are the same each year (and that hasn't been the case; 2018 is higher than normal), it's a ~1% chance that something happens at your school over 13 years of schooling. Without doing a ton of research, I'm sure the odds would be much more or less depending on the school you pick.

Is that enough for you to keep your kid out of school? That's for you to decide. But bringing it back to my point - evaluating the risk isn't as simple as giving a body count, making "dangerous" a subjective term.

[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2018/12/10/18134232/gun-violence-schools...

Further, what is the variance across schools? If you don’t send your child to a school in a dodgy neighborhood, can you expect a significant drop in risk? If so, how much?

While living i a "nicer" neighborhood does greatly reduce the chance of your child being the victim of violent crime in general, especially outside of school, the majority of deadly school shootings didn't happen in particularly "dodgy neighborhoods".

Do you have a citation? I could believe the most high-profile school shootings don't happen in dodgy neighborhoods, but the notion that school shootings generally are rarer in more violent neighborhoods seems counter-intuitive.

Let me revise my statement. I still suspect I'm right if we're talking deadly school shootings (most school shootings aren't deadly) but I'll have to run the numbers. A statement that is correct is that the majority of school shooting deaths the past 20 years happened in not dodgy neighborhoods.

Columbine High School was not in a "dodgy neighborhood". Nor was the shooting at that school in Florida a year or two ago. Nor was Virginia Tech in 2008.

In fact, I don't think any of the mass shootings in American schools have been in poor schools at all. Of course, they have their own problems with violence stemming from gang activity and poverty, but the mass shootings are in schools with pretty well-off students.

My question was posted in the context of its thread. Specifically, the figures we were discussing were about "gun related incidents", not mass shootings; the OP took the time to explain that these included things like brandishing a firearm or bullets striking school property whether or not there was a shooter on the property or someone got hurt. I would expect these sorts of incidents to happen more often in more violent communities; mass school shootings seem like they follow a different pattern than other kinds of gun violence.

~1% sounds pretty high to me.

Compare this to other countries like Germany or Japan. What are the chances that your schoolkid is going to experience any kind of violence on that level in schools there? Virtually zero.

Take a look at the murder rate for the US and compare to Japan's. For the US, it was 17,250 murders in 2016, a rate of 5.35 (per 100k people). In Germany, they had 963 murders in 2016, a rate of 1.18. In Japan, they had 362 murders in 2016, a rate of 0.28. The US had 4.5 times Germany's murder rate, and over 19 times Japan's!

I'd say it's outright lunacy to think that the US isn't a very dangerous country to live in. Just check out the rankings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

The US is ranking alongside such nations as Sudan, Ecuador, Argentina, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Kenya. Even North Korea has a lower murder rate; Turkey, India, Rwanda, Egypt, and Iran have significantly lower murder rates than the US. China is downright safe with a murder rate of only 0.62! (Of course, the pollution will probably kill you early there...)

I think the statistics clearly show the US is not a very safe place to live: murder rate, mass shooting rates, gun violence rates, etc. are all extremely high in the US compared to developed nations. And it's likely to get worse, as our elections have shown.

This is good stuff. You're proving my point: "dangerous" is a value judgment!

Do you live in the US? I do, and I've never felt unsafe in any of the places I've lived in. Maybe I'm 4-5x more likely to be murdered here compared to Germany, but a 0.00535% chance of getting murdered this year doesn't really move the needle for me. I also know that there are wide variances in that rate based on the community I live in, the people I associate with, and the activities in which I partake.

If you think you'd feel safer in North Korea because the murder rate is lower, feel free to live there instead! I'll take my chances here.

Honest question: if you take causes of death of school-aged children and ranked them by frequency, where on that list would you expect to find school shootings?

Mass elementary shootings in the US are presented as happening far more often then they do - I think there have been only two mass shootings at an elementary school in the US in the last 20 years, with a total of 32 victim deaths.

And remember, the US a has a large population - 60 times more people live here than in, say, Norway. So for a given incidence rate per capita, you would expect the US to have more. If you use per capita figures instead, in the past twenty years, more people have been killed by mass shootings (5 or more strangers), in Norway than in the US. (I totally cherry picked Norway, bad me! Though I could have also used France, which also had more per capita deaths from mass shootings than the US in the last five years.)

Now it's still an absolute tragedy, but on the list of things to worry about, your child being killed in a mass elementary school shooting in the US is about an order of magnitude less likely that you being struck and killed by lighting.

>And remember, the US a has a large population - 60 times more people live here than in, say, Norway. So for a given incidence rate per capita, you would expect the US to have more. In the past twenty years, more people have been killed by mass shootings (5 or more strangers), in Norway than in the US.

Japan has a large population too, about 120M. But the US has 19 times the murder rate of Japan.

I'm sorry, I don't buy the "large population" canard. Lots of European countries have large populations too: UK, Germany, France, Italy all have ~60-80M each. The US is not an order of magnitude greater than these. China has far more people than the US, yet it only has a murder rate of 0.62, compared to the US's 5.35. Japan's is 0.28. The US has a murder rate that compares with those in Sudan and Zimbabwe. But hey, at least we're not as bad as Brazil or El Salvador... /s

I'm talking about population numbers since it directly affects the odds that your kid would be killed.

No, per-capita rates, not absolute population numbers, are what directly affect the odds that anything will happen to you personally. That's why we have per-capita rates.

The only place where per-capita comparisons really break down are for very tiny countries (micronations). When the population is only a few thousand, you can't get good statistical data from that as the sample size is too small, plus micronations just don't compare to real nations for many reasons. But that's not the issue here because we're comparing nations that all have populations well into the tens of millions or more.

> I would argue that mass shootings in the US are a very good reason not to raise any kids here or send them to school here, considering many of those shootings were in schools, and many schoolchildren (or college students) have died in those shootings.

Mass violence against students is hardly a phenomenon that's exclusive to the US.

See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-kinderga... for a recent example.

You only support my point. Someone in China goes wacko, and 14 kids are injured. No one died.

If you somehow think a nutcase with a knife can do as much damage as a nutcase with an assault rifle, I don't know how to help you.