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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

How long has it been since a mass casualty shooting? I'd rather we live in a world where those don't happen, and what we've been doing so far hasn't worked. So while your advice works for some people, unfortunately it doesn't work for everybody. For someone with horribly low esteem/other problems that they've given up, giving them tools to help them get out of that hole so they are able to go out and make friends IRL seems like a win in my book.

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Mass shootings are significantly rarer than the world (and one's own anxious brain) makes them seem. The risk of dying from a so many other things absolutely dwarf the risk of being shot to death. You're more than twice as likely to die in a car accident than be shot to death. You're more likely to die from an accidental injury than be shot to death by about 10 fold. And that's just for all gun homicides. If you break that down, you're significantly more likely to die by a gun that's shot by yourself, a police officer, or somebody you know than by a stranger. Mass casualty events are even small.

I agree with your point at large, though. The mass shooting panic is a little frustrating when you actually look at the numbers, though. Your risk of dying by gun assault is about 1 in 300, but the risk of dying in a mass shooting is about 1 in 11,000.

I am giving those people a tool. Find a local sports league, improv group or regular trivia night and start going. It's fine if you only talk to the person working the league or the employees the first couple times - they're paid to talk to you. When muscles atrophy, it's fine to take small steps to make them strong again.

You are far more likely to die driving to work than you are encountering a mass casualty event - that kind of becomes an excuse at some point. If you are really concerned, the biggest targets are large public events and schools (US only), which aren't a great place to work on social anxiety anyways.

I think his point was that, evidently, trying the same solutions over and over to the mass shooting problem is as futile as giving out the same trite dating advice. Not that he's concerned about joining an improv group due to the risk of mass shootings. We may have found Quinlan's HN account.

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