[flagged]
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
Don't go by what the media portrays. Your comment makes it sound like Tech workers can never take vacation or have kids. It couldn't be furthest from the truth.
That's out of 330 million total population.
1. https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-active-sh...
If we go look at other categories of shootings for 2022 we see that more than 20k people died from non-suicide gunshots.
And there were 647 mass shootings.
There were roughly 20k gun homicides in the US in 2021[0]. It's been fluctuating between 10k and 20k over the past five decades or so, with the last few years seeing a quick increase and seeing a (hopefully) local peak in rates.
In one study in San Francisco, ~70% of gun homicide victims had a criminal record, and three quarters of that figure knew the suspect[1]. A similar study in Milwaukee found that ~90% of both victims and suspects of gun homicides had a criminal record[2], and the top two reasons identified of the circumstances behind the homicide were arguments/fights and robberies. There are other studies done at local levels in many other places with similar results.
A DOJ study notes that three quarters of all gun homicides were during the commission of a (different) felony[3]. And you can query the CDC WONDER mortality database[4] yourself to see that gun homicide rates in "large central metro" areas are twice as high as those in medium, small, or non-metro areas, and that men 15-34 years of age comprise the majority of gun homicide victims.
So, perhaps my "gang-on-gang" statement wasn't really accurate (since a "gang-related" incident is loosely defined), and I'll leave the "vast majority" determination to you; but the point is that most gun homicides occur among the "criminal element" in "bad parts of town", and is not really relevant to life as a software engineer.
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...
[1]: https://www.sfdph.org/dph/files/reports/StudiesData/Firearms...
[2]: https://www.mcw.edu/-/media/MCW/Departments/Epidemiology/MHR...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1192970/europe-railway-a...
Railroad deaths totaled 893 in 2021, a 20% increase from the 2020 revised total of 744 and the highest since 2007. Nonfatal injuries totaled 5,781, a 4% increase from the 2020 revised total of 5,544.
For me, "never get sick or have any kids or anything" is a much stronger point against life the US - these are issues almost everyone has to confront.
The U.S. Is the Only Country Among Its Peers in Which Guns Are the Leading Cause of Death Among Children and Teens
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> I'll keep matching the energy I see here
The problem here is in the "I see". People don't see their own negative contributions clearly. We overestimate the bad that others are bringing and underestimate our own by 10x or more. This is why it always feels like the other started it and did worse [1], while we are merely reacting, defending ourselves, or (to use your word) matching. We all have this bias, which means that if all you do is match what you see, you'll in fact be escalating and worsening a downward spiral [2].
What you (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) should instead do is consciously adjust for objects in the mirror being closer than they appear [3]. That is, if you make a point of responding with less negativity than what you see others as bringing, it may be possible to partly compensate for that bias. In that case this crude and unsophisticated blob of internet humanity may at least manage not to burn itself to a crisp [4].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(I'm sorry for footnoting my own past comments - it's an embarrassing practice but it's the only easy way I have to link people to past explanations. Such links are helpful for clarifying and also for depersonalizing; they quickly make it clear that all of these issues are systemic and have been the same for years.)