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cheez

So _why_ if it works for 80% of polled people does it keep being touted as it resulting in bankruptcy consistently?

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The same reason that guns result in 1% of deaths but you hear about them constantly. It makes for a good news program.

You're _honestly_ saying that fears over school shootings in the US are overblown because it makes for good news?

Yes.

School shootings average 4 deaths per year. They are very tragic and very sad, but you should fear them about as much as you fear cows. In fact, cows kill a lot more people than school shootings do.

All this fearmongering over such a rare occurrence is actively causing harm: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/11/lockdown-...

The only presidential candidate to speak truth about this... Andrew Yang.

He said the drills are misguided though right?

Not that the US obsession with guns and lax gun control that enables school shootings is defensible.

Yes, that the drills are misguided. And he is fine with the obsession with guns, suggested using palm/grip recognition to tie guns to owners with free updates paid for by govt. Reasonable.

More reasonable than the anti gun control people, but it's still an insane solution to the problem, in the grand scheme of things.

Because?

Because in the grand-scheme of things, the countries that have banned guns don't have the problems you have.

Crazy, I know.

Americans have guns because we believe that individual citizens may, god forbid, need to kill people. Many Europeans, by contrast, believe that they are past that, at a point in history where only the State needs the power to kill.

Who knows who is right. But it’s ridiculously arrogant to say that the American position is not defensible. It was literally just a couple of generations ago when the US was air dropping rifles into France to support the Resistance. Even if we have now entered an age where ordinary people don’t need guns—that new age is younger than computers, supersonic flight, or television. Its far too soon to conclude that’s this is how the world will always be from here forward.

I think you're missing that Europeans also recognise that giving every dumbass, desperate person or dormant psychopath a gun, is far more likely to get people killed NOW, than the chances that when the 'end-times' you imply come, all these same people are going to someone effectively unite and overthrow the regime.

It's a crackpot idea to think that 'arming citizens' helps the whole. And the fact you think it's 'arrogant' to spell out a basic truth that the rest of the world understands is dumbfounding.

Deaths of children. At school.

For literally nothing.

They are _avoidable_, that's why they are not overstated.

Every death is a tragedy. Many are avoidable. If we want to actually reduce tragedy and suffering, your time and energy is best spent on big problems.

A school age child is nearly 200x more likely to die by suicide than from a school shooting. That's a tragedy. And that's _avoidable_. Which do you hear about more?

The attention and resources of society are limited. We would be better off allocating resources to bigger problems, but we don't. That's a tragedy.

Um, why not both.

The rest of the world doesn't have the school shooter problem.

It's fixable, and the fix is bleedingly obvious. There's no excuse.

How are they avoidable?

Do you mean that 1 in 100 gets shot dead during their lifetime? In the US

It’s a misleading statistic that gets used because it helps push the narrative that things are broken: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5865642.

> However, the magnitude of the bankruptcy effect is much smaller than previously thought: we estimate that hospitalizations cause only 4% of personal bankruptcies among nonelderly U.S. adults, which is an order of magnitude smaller than the previous estimates described above.

I'm not so sure that rate of medical bankruptcies is the metric I'd use to measure the healthcare system! But point taken.

The other 20% is a lot of people.

Yup, the US is the 3rd most populated country on the planet.

Take a look at bankruptcy due to health issues in Canada. It’s lower than the US, but still a problem. They have a single payer system, but what people tend to forget is if you’re really sick, you often can’t work, so even if health costs are minimal, you can still go bankrupt.

What I think would be helpful in the US is universal catastrophic insurance. Worst case scenario, you’re covered. If you want everyday health insurance, let people buy it or get covered if low income.

Many universal system use this type of coverage.

If you're already in a lot of debt, getting a medical bill is just going to add to that debt. As a result, anyone who sees a doctor and declares bankruptcy can say that healthcare is at least partially to blame.

I get the logic, but I'm more looking for statistics.

I can't tell whether there are "too many" medical bankruptcies, but I know that pundits are exaggerating the degree of severity. This link has some statistics, so you can take what you want from it.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jan/31/jose-oliva...

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