March 2020 was the first March without a school shooting in the U.S. since 2002 | Hacker News Reader

March 2020 was the first March without a school shooting in the U.S. since 2002

cbsnews.com

118 pointslxm39 comments

"there were a total of seven shootings that took place on school campuses in March 2020. Four of those shootings were classified as unintentional discharges, one took place between adults on a high school football field over the weekend and two occurred on college campuses but involved no students."

I find it odd that these don't count, and that they happened in the first place.

When you include these kinds of incidents in the tallies of "shootings", the picture looks even worse for the US as a whole.

These kinds of events are in fact normally counted.

A veteran committing suicide in the parking lot of a long disused school counts as a ‘school shooting’.

It’s dishonest.

Most "school shootings" which are counted in statistics are actually events like this - incidents of violence which simply happen to occur near an educational institution such as universities.

School shootings refer to mass killings or attempted killings directed at fellow students and staff, usually indiscriminately.

Adding “normal” homicides, suicides, gang violence and accidents that could happen anywhere, and that happen due to ancient, well understood motivations, would be too noisy and create the need for a new statistic and term that exclude them.

Anywhere is a misnomer in this case as no other country has such a gun culture so anywhere in the US is probably more appropriate.

Yes, we are discussing an article about US statistics but I shouldn’t have assumed that in my more general comment.

Unless my reading comprehension is off this morning, that claim seems incredibly misleading.

It seems like they're using two different definitions of school shooting. Even though there have been multiple shootings at schools in March of 2020, it's been decided none of them count because they either didn't involve students or because they were caused by negligence and not a desire to intentionally harm someone.

However they're not judging other years as stringently. I spot checked a few years in their cited sources[1][2] and about half the years I looked at seemed iffy.

For example, look at their data for 2009. Neither of their "school shootings" actually happened at a school.

For 2004, the only school shooting was a suicide, which is technically a school shooting but probably less of a threat to students than the 4 shootings at school this March that were caused by negligent discharges.

The only incident they have for 2006[3] was someone who was beaten to death, not sure how that counts as a shooting. (QUICK EDIT, I'm wrong about this one, I thought the events were listed in chronological order but they aren't so I missed some actual shootings)

[1]: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED519244.pdf

[2]: https://www.schoolsecurity.org/trends/violent-deaths-and-sch...

[3]: https://www.schoolsecurity.org/trends/violent-deaths-and-sch...

Yes, this is exactly what they are doing.

The shooting in March 2003 also seems to be a suicide attempt

There were a lot of firsts in March 2020.

I protest the flagging of any article on Hacker News as being antithetical to the ethos of free speech. It is unbecoming that HN allows flagging.

Two obvious things:

- Schools weren't opened for most of the month

- Article is pushing an anti-gun agenda (not surprising for CBS)

What is glaringly omitted: how is a "school shooting" defined? The article mentioned some event that happened on campus (in the football field), which probably counts as a "school shooting" knowing the source of the data is an anti gun rights group. I wouldn't be surprised if the definition is quite broad so as to boost the stats.

So this is obvious narrative-pushing. But I might counter with, "See, this is a great reason to keep the schools closed. Look at the reduction in school shootings!" Which would fit right in with the level of discourse in American politics.

On a meta level, I'm genuinely curious how people's attitudes have changed throughout the COVID pandemic, not only about guns, but about homeschooling, privacy, surveillance, time with family, etc, etc.

You betray your own politics with the word "agenda," but taking you at face value, what's wrong with being anti-gun?

The biggest problem I see with being anti-gun, isn’t the desire to have a less fearful or violent society.

It’s that anti-gun positions generally are not at all anti-gun they are anti-private individual, but happy for the state to use guns, and thus to be the sole arbiter of who is defended and who is defenseless.

>positions generally are not at all anti-gun they are anti-private individual

Well that's definitely a stream of apophasis that doesn't address my question, but maybe we can save it if you describe where you draw the line between anti-gun and "anti-private individual." IME they are always conflated within the discourse.

If you're implying a hypocrisy in supporting police having guns but people not, I don't agree, but even without that I'm fine if all guns go away. Does that now make my question answerable for you?

I’m indeed implying the hypocrisy. I’m also fine with all guns going away. However nobody who is anti-gun is suggesting that in reality.

I guess it all depends on how much you trust your government and police. Anti-gun sentiment seem to be about forcing the views of those who have reason to trust them, onto those who don’t, at gunpoint no less.

That seems wrong to me.

Yes. It's deliberate facetious. It's making the point that school gun violence is so widespread, so rampant, so unchallenged, that the only way to avoid it has been to shut schools completely.

You shouldn't quibble over definitions, worry about narratives or attitudes. You should consider what can be done to make schools safer environments for our children.

We should ban encryption so shooters can't plan their attacks without being watched - for the children of course.

If that's the limit of our ability to consider something better, the kids don't stand a chance.

Exactly the problem with modern gun control proposals.

I mean, it's all about the children right? Anything for the children! Might as well wrap up each of them in a biosuit with restrained arm movement so there's absolutely 0% chance of anyone committing any sort of harm whatsoever.

Seriously, get real. Justifying the elimination of natural rights with "thinking of the children" is a common trope by authoritarians to seize control.

What's with this silly nth degree stuff? Why can't you handle the idea of incremental change? Is the situation really beyond any worthwhile improvement in your eyes?

I'm not reassured when you describe recurrent mass murder of children as a trope. Get some perspective.

It's such an infrequent event it's literally a rounding error. The only reason it's even brought up is because it gets attention on the news - which is in and of itself a feedback loop, as more attention brings more copycats.

I grew up in an area where every other house had dozens of guns. Surprisingly, we didn't have a school shooting every day. In fact, we had none. I'm not using anecdotal data to support any argument, but if it were indeed the case that more guns = more baby and child killings, then I wouldn't be here to write this comment.

My main concern here is the erosion of natural rights based on the premise that it is "for the children", which is a trope. It's been used for all manners of privacy violations, from indefinite detentions, proposals to ban encryption, PRISM, etc.

If you genuinely care and have an open mind, you'll see it's extremely dubious as to whether enforcing more restrictions would have any effect, barring throwing the Constitution in the trash and seizing everything. Conversely, we can think of the children and ban cars so they stop dying in car accidents, because no more car accidents will happen.

I'm okay with incremental positive change, but they have to be data-driven and made respecting the Constitution. The US got this far due to its framework, its shared values on freedom and liberty, and lack of an oppressive, overreaching government. It derives its success from the freedom of its citizens to chart the course of their life, not from the nanny state telling them what they can and can't smoke, shoot, eat, code, read, write, or drive.

Rounding error?! The US had 434 mass shootings in 2019, between ~50,000 middle-to-higher institutions. Assuming each of the 434 events happened at different institutions, you had a 99.132% chance of not being present at a school shooting in 2019.

But you're at one of these institutions (middle through undergrad) for 11 years? Your probability of being at one of these during a shooting compounds to 90.86%.

9-in-10 people and their friends had a nice time, but that remaining 1 was there when four or more of their school were gunned down.

I don't disagree that the Constitution gives Americans a fair whack at freedom, but it also frustrates democracy. If a clear majority wanted to change things, even incrementally (background and mental health checks, storage laws esp child-access, restricting higher form assault weapons), overcoming the 66% bar really makes progress on [inexplicably] partisan issues like this impossible.

You've got to weigh up what this law was designed to do, against what it's permitting today. I think it's obvious we come to a different result when we balance that equation but I'm not deaf to your views either.

(Edit: Important to note that 434 is the mass shooting number. It's just 1% of all gun violence in schools.)

Meant to say: Your probability of not being at one of these during a shooting compounds to 90.86%.

Most of those events are unrelated violence that just happens to be near institutions, not actual shootings. This includes gang-on-gang violence nearby, people shooting themselves in their car, accidental discharges, etc. Look at the actual numbers involved and the descriptions of the events themselves. There's a lot of interest in making it seem worse than it is, as you've clearly demonstrated.

Bad statistic. School has been either cancelled or online.

It's be like saying "No electrocutions" in the 1700s or no "social media anything's in the 1800s".

School wasn't cancelled nationwide in early March. My area didn't cancel school until March 15th.

That's not what it's saying. The headline is suggesting it's notable that there has been a school shooting each March since 2003.

What's more interesting is how starkly negative and hypocritical HN is.

Yes, children are murdering other children with guns in school. If that mattered, we collectively would have done something to stop that. Politically, it didn't matter. Children were acceptable casualties for 'muricans' to have guns.

And politically, it's a pointless battle be it online -or- in person. HN certainly makes a point in not doing flamewars.. not much more flames can be stoked than with a gun debate with US politics (well, abortion).

So, I looked at their "statistic", in a dry scientific manner. Of course there's no gun violence at schools. They're cancelled or online.

Pretty sure that’s the main point of the article. It took a global pandemic for us to not have a shooting

Maybe not the weapons are the problem, but the lack of the right motivation.

Maybe it's a combination of the two: the weapons, with the right motivation.

It's a statistic, but not terribly useful. I wouldn't consider ongoing pandemic lockdowns as some sort of solution for what comes down to a cultural problem. Incidentally, we made the problem go away artificially, but that doesn't mean that we really know anything as a result besides that school shootings don't happen when there's no school to shoot up.

The point of the article is to explain the happy statistical exception

Right. The takeaway isn't that it's a victory for gun control. It's that under the status quo, it takes an absence of school attendance for there to be an absence of shootings.

I also think this is a stupid statistic, who the hell is counting the first March since blah year?

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