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Comment by add-sub-mul-div | Hacker News Reader

> From the 2000–01 to 2021–22 school years, there were 1,375 school shootings at public and private elementary and secondary schools, resulting in 515 deaths and 1,161 injuries.

1,700 people out of ~50 million K-12 students in a 22 year period.

.003352% chance of injury or worse over 22 years. And now I realize the denominator should be bigger because it doesn't count faculty/staff or college students.

There's no reason to live in fear of school shootings. (But there should still be much greater gun control.)

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When there is a school shooting, you should count everyone in the school as deeply affected. Maybe the district.

From wikipedia it looks like there's 13,000 school districts in the US - so 1 in 10 (!!!!) has had a school shooting in the last 22 years. Am I doing this right?

You are assuming that each school shooting is in a separate district in the calculation. That is not necessarily the case, especially with some large school district serving many more students than a small rural district.

But I agree with you that it affects the school and community deeply, even in surrounding communities. I live in Texas, and the whole state was deeply affected after Uvalde. A relative's school got evacuated a few weeks later out of what happened to be a false alarm, with the relative forced to exit the school hands above their head to show they didn't have a gun. They were on the complete other side of the state, probably like a 6 hour drive away.

I'd say far worse. So much US discourse is about school shootings, that it's clear it's affecting people far outside the school districts themselves.

It's affectional national politics.

I think only concentrating on those that were shot or injured ignores the impact of being exposed to gun violence, especially during formative years in a situation where it's in the building you're in and results in the death or injury of your friends. Hundreds of thousands of people in the USA have experienced being in a school shooting event.

I also think that it's fair to think about other examples of exposure to violence and not just the Parent's example of weekly school shootings. Speaking of gun violence, I'm not sure I know anyone personally in the USA who haven't been impacted by it, whether that's knowing someone who was hurt, having to lock down at work or home, having to drive a different route home because of an active shooting, or just hearing it and then hearing the sirens. Of course, these are not all equal, but it's interesting to think about.

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