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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

> All shootings at schools includes when a gun is fired, brandished with intent to harm, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time, or day of the week.

This definition is broad enough to encompass e.g. someone barricading themselves in an apartment a few blocks away with a 5.57 rifle and shooting at the police; this happened at my daughter's HS, and a bullet did land on the campus just because the campus is large and was in the same general direction.

It also seems like it would be broad enough to include a police officer drawing their duty weapon on a student threatening another student with a knife (also happened at my daughter's HS), but I'm less sure about that.

Neither of those would be considered "school shootings" by the vast majority of the population.

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So instead of addressing the elephant in the room, we talk about grammar and imaginary situations. No wonder things will never get fixed.

The elephant in this room is that the "school shooting" numbers are being inflated.

People say "oh America is so bad it has so many school shootings" then you look at what counts as a school shooting and it's stuff that poses no danger to students and may not have even happened at a school.

I don't think most Americans or non-Americans really pay too much attention to school shootings one way or another. But when they see semi-regular news of shootings at schools resulting in large amounts of children being slain they're inclined to think something is wrong in the US. And when it comes to the pervasiveness of US gun culture and how easy it is to get tooled up over there, they're not wrong. Regardless of implied stat inflation, the US is still the undisputed school shooting champion of the world.

> But when they see semi-regular news of shootings at schools resulting in large amounts of children being slain...

But they don't. Look at the history e.g. on Wikipedia [0]. It tracks school shootings with >= 4 victims in the last 300 years.

To call 10 times in the last 10 years semi-regular is a stretch. Most of those didn't make it into the public consciousness. People will remember Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Columbine, but those were 12, 18, and 26 years ago.

To call them large numbers of slain is a stretch, that Wikipedia article is events >= 4 deaths. Those 4 include perpetrators, the number of innocent victims is lower.

To call them children is a stretch, because a lot of the victims are adults/employees/shooters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

This is still arguing about semantics. Switzerland, the poster child argument of gun culture enthusiasts saying "but also they all have guns" had zero such events, whichever way you choose to define them, above or below 4 killed persons. And nobody cares about the exact number anyway outside the "nah we're fine" group, indeed they just want it safer.

> Switzerland, the poster child argument of gun culture enthusiasts saying "but also they all have guns" had zero such events

America has 38 times the population of Switzerland. If Switzerland was equally as dangerous you'd expect them to have 1/38th the events. That Wikipedia page lists 35 events. How many would we expect Switzerland to have? A bit less than 1, so either 1 or 0. That matches the observed data.

> And nobody cares about the exact number anyway outside the "nah we're fine" group, indeed they just want it safer.

Maybe they should. The chance for any student in America being killed in a school shooting is something like 1 in 10,000,000. That's around the chance of being killed by lightning. Not struck by lightning - that's a 10x more common 1 in 1,000,000 - but struck and killed by lightning.

How much effort to people put into not being killed by lightning? Not much other than knowing 'don't go outside in a thunderstorm'. The risk of school shootings should give students equal alarm.

> imaginary situations

Neither situation was hypothetical; they both happened at my daughter's High School. Anecdotal certainly, but not imaginary. Certainly nobody says "There have been two school shootings at that HS in the past few years"

> Certainly nobody says "There have been two school shootings at that HS in the past few years"

In most countries nobody says that about any school.

The term should be changed to "school massacre". I think that would cleanly narrow the definition in a way that is compatible with common usage.

Speaking of which, I don't understand why that term fell out of favor. Like we already have a term for "mass shooting". It's not called the "Boston Mass Shooting".

But then you'd have to include things like bombings and maybe bomb threats. And that might re-focus attention away from the chosen tools and towards the people doing it, which would make it less useful for election season.

> This definition is broad enough to encompass (...)

And that's perfectly fine. This criteria covers all conceivable scenarios where a kid going to school can be shot. Isn't that the whole point?

When people talk about "stopping school shootings" they don't tend to want to substitute a student with a knife getting arrested at gunpoint with that student stabbing another student.

this may be a bit unfair. stopping school shootings by any sane argument is ALWAYS about gun control.

as an exercise - take any definition of a school shooting you desire. then compare USA with any country on the planet of your choosing (you can even pick random geographical area spanning random number of countries) and see whether the childhood our children are subjected to are comparable. we have failed and are continuing to fail our children, regardless of how you choose to define what school shooting

Even conceding that point, if I were to say something absurd like "There were sixteen-quadrillion school shootings in the US last year" and someone pushes back on that, I can't just fall back on "well there were a lot" and absolve myself of rhetorical malpractice.

our public discourse currently is a lot of what we are talking about here - let's try to "define" what school shooting is. to me, as far as that goes (as I mentioned, regardless of the definition of it) we are not 3rd but 4th World Country

The whole point seems to be to cast as wide a net as possible for the definition as so to claim a higher number of "school shootings" than the majority agreed definition suggests.

Makes me wonder what motive people could have to do this.

I wonder if your wondering is rhetorical? There is a pretty obvious candidate.

It was.

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