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Comment by phs318u | Hacker News Reader

> We've created a fear bubble around kids and they don't know what danger is

I believe they do know, and its far worse than the danger of a broken arm or sprained ankle. It's the danger of being shot dead. I urge everyone to read this article and imagine yourself as a child being told this stuff and "practicing" hiding and being quiet in an active shooter scenario. Far more terrifying than any playground from the past.

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a40732/what-...

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Which is ridiculous as kids being shot is extremely extremely low risk.

Slightly tricky to get the numbers here as most sources include colleges full of adults under "school shootings" and most school shooters shoot teachers rather than students, but it looks to be around 70 since the year 2000.

Which is such a small number that it should be completely irrelevant from a public policy and safety perspective. Heck the nuances of road signage law and hazardous chemical labelling are probably hundreds of times more important. The stress of worrying about it probably costs more life years than the shootings (which average at around one life hour per person).

I was in school after 9/11 when they started having terrorist drills and such. It's not like we sat in fear all day. We were kids. We weighed it the same as the fire drill or the tornado drill. Even seeing 9/11 on TV and being of age to vividly remember it and understand what it meant didn't seem to do much of anything 20 years down the line now in terms of traumas in my generation. At least kids aren't being forced to die in a far away war when they turn 18 anymore like they were in my fathers generation and in his fathers generation.

oh yeah, drills were the FUNNEST. Earthquake drills were my favourite. No terrorist drills though, that's pretty American.

It seems to be a trend all around the western world but the danger of being shot isn't present outside of the US. I think it's more of a fear culture then a real threat to the children themselves.

I guess even in the US being shot by a mass shooter is several orders of magnitude less likely than being run over by a car?

It appears to be feared disproportionately.

Recency bias and a tendency to miscalculate the odds of something that is A) awful and B) played on repeat for days. Also, angry reactionaries always demand that the authorities “do something about this!”

Those factors pretty much guarantee that there will be a swift, uncalculated, often showy response to public tragedy.

It's pretty insidious. Kids getting shot at school is rare, so it's reported on. Kids getting killed by drivers is so common that bereaved parents have to beg and plead and scream at their elected officials to get them to even notice, much less do anything.

Like a lot of modern problems, the blame partly lies with the news media and partly with mass innumeracy.

Essentially. I distinctly remember an article about some multi-car pileup a couple days after a mass shooting, and noting that the otherwise unremarkable car accident ended up in 2x the causalities

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