Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

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There are school shootings and they’re certainly awful. Similarly, people sometimes get struck by lightning, and this is awful too. But if your goal is to prevent deaths, rather than to focus on the things that make for the most lurid news stories, then there are boring things like road safety that loom much larger in the numbers than they do in the public imagination. Here are some numbers on causes of death for children and adolescents in the US, reported by the CDC:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6637963/

Figures for deaths from school shootings are harder to come by, since it seems like all the sources are trying to push some political narrative or other, but the highest numbers I could find were in the low double digits per year (on average). Preventing those doesn’t strike me as a high-priority use of limited death-prevention resources.

From your own link, there are 12,000 injury related deaths. Of those, over 1/3 are firearms related and 1/3 of those are homicides. They may not be school shootings, but damn does that seem related to the second word.

Anyway, to answer your question: because we already do a lot to stop the other causes. Cars have oodles of safety regulations, for instance. Home pools have rules on covers in many states, lifeguards are placed at water features. But we can't just snap our fingers and stop all car deaths, or cure all disease.

Meanwhile shooting deaths are an entirely artificial problem, which we actively do less than nothing to solve. Both by avoiding root cause fixes - not only avoiding addressing mental health, but actively encouraging bullying of minorities like trans students - but also avoiding regulation of the most effective tools (guns).

And, just a final point, humans are human. A kid dying in a tragic accident or disease is heartbreaking. But a dozen kids being eviscerated on Live TV repeatedly for someone's entire adult life, with tens of millions of people having the audacity to say "get over it, we refuse to talk about this" or "even "it's a hoax"? That's enraging.

We are emotional animals, but I'm more than happy that we try to leverage our empathy to make the world a better place. We can do more than one thing at a time, after all. For instance, under your argument, nobody should have bothered inventing amber alerts because it doesn't save hundreds of kids per year.

For a lot of people, emotions are more important than pragmatism.

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