Should School Shootings be national news?

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Maybe this is crass; but this is the fact. School shootings are not a big problem in the US. I have a teenaged son. I am worried a lot about drunk driving (which kills 11,000 teenagers each year). I am worried about drugs. I am worried about suicide. These are the things that kill teenagers.

The odds of a teenager dying in a school shooting are almost zero. There are two dozen deaths in a bad year compared to tens of thousands of deaths from drugs and alcohol and driving and all the stupid things teenagers do.

So, why are school shootings so sexy that we need to splash them across the headlines for days? Every political group from gun rights, to racial justice to religious groups are jumping on with their own personal spin. It is crazy and a little opportunistic using death to push an agenda. But here we are.

The worse thing is the national attention probably makes a school shooting more likely, some disturbed kid will see this as a way to become famous.

These school shootings should be treated as a local story. A kid does something horrible and there are some deaths. It is the same story as a drunk driving accident or kids drowning in the quarry.

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Type: Question • Score: 5 • Views: 992 • Replies: 48

View best answer, chosen by maxdancona

@maxdancona,

I was with you for a while. Until –

Quote:

So, why are school shootings so sexy that we need to splash them across the headlines for days?

"Sexy"? Really? Part of your penchant for labeling things as various examples of "porn"? I'm surprised you didn't say the attention paid to school shootings was "silly" and work "ideological narrative©" into the response. And accuse people who worry of being scaredy-cats.

Look, use your head. There have been 21 school shootings since August 1. As ubiquitous as they have become, they are still horrific, and yes, they are a big problem in the US. No, tens of thousands schoolkids aren't being killed every year, but, as with the pandemic, the mere number of fatalities isn't the main issue. It's how the danger affects the educational process. Cops walking in the halls, active shooter drills, metal detectors, parents and students living with a low level of dread. It casts a spell. And it's natural to wonder what went wrong in some student's head and what might have been done to prevent the incident.

Quote:

These school shootings should be treated as a local story.

If and when they ever are, it'll mean they have become so normal as to be commonplace and expected. Luckily we're not at that stage yet. I do think that masking the identity of the shooter might be a good idea. Achieving notoriety is considered to be one of the goals of these shooters.

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@hightor,

So, the number of people "killed or injured" a year from school shootings is about 60 people. And there are 29 instances of school shootings (out of more than 100,000 schools).

So we agree on the facts?

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Up here you can't name a minor or the parents of a minor if that would identify a minor. I don't always agree with that because I think a better-informed public is a safer public, but that's the way it is.

And I was also taken aback at the 'sexy' comment, but it is to be expected, no?

1 Reply

@Mame,

My question is to we overreact to school shootings when statistically they are one of the least significant threats facing teens. Tens of thousands of teens commit suicide each year. Thousands die of drunk driving. Hundreds of teens each year die of drowning (yes several times more teens drown than die of shooting).

Why are we obsessed with this one issue that impacts so few people? Hightor's souce said 60 teens were "killed or injured" in school shootings. My source said 24 killed... of course they can both be correct. Nationally with millions of kids in a hundred thousand schools, this is a small number.

Why aren't there more national stories about teens drowning? I think "sexy" is the correct word... when it comes to journalism (or political activism) some issues arouse more interest.

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@maxdancona,

1. Yes, I do agree with you on some of your points.
2. But, I also disagree with you on some of your points.
3. At a later time, I will elaborate where I agree with you and where I disagree with you.
4. But, for now I want to share with you what I found on wikipedia.
5. At the bottom is a wikipedia link that list chronologically, American school shootings from the year 2000 to the current year of 2021.
6. To the best of my knowledge, I only remember seeing only a very small percentage of those in the national news.
7. So, just maybe the vast majority of the school shootings never actually make the national news.
8. So, just maybe the vast majority of school shootings are treated only as a local news story.
9. I don't know what method the national news use to determine which school shootings they cover verses which school shootings they don't cover.
10. Below is the wikipedia link that am referring to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

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@maxdancona,

Because it's a violent crime committed by a minor to other unsuspecting minors and it's horrifying. We're not talking numbers, max... we're talking about the event.

Of course kids die other ways, and it IS tragic, but going to school to learn and then getting shot at is something unexpected (or should be, anyway) and completely unnecessary.

You are always going on about numbers - the number who died of Covid compared to... etc., etc., etc. But this is not about numbers - it's about the expectations of children being able to go to school safely. It's about how a minor can get a hold of a gun and why he'd want to kill others. It's about the gun and killing culture in the US. Just like the numbers of unvaccinated who die of Covid - completely preventable. It doesn't matter if more people die of x, y, and z... this is PREVENTABLE.

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@Mame,

It is White kids killing White kids that makes this such a sensational story. When the kids involved aren't White, it is not a national story.

The unrealistic narrative being sold is "It could happen to your kid". The target audience is uptight middle-class White women. This happens to be a very important demographic both commercially and politically. So, although the risk is exceedingly small (1 in 2 million) it is pumped up and pushed on the national stage.

Out of all of the cases of violence involving "unsuspecting minors" why is this the one that is "horrifying". It is the idea that the White suburbs should be pristine bubbles of safety where bad things never happen.

The fact is the occurrence of this type of violence is exceedingly rare in White suburbs. The expectation that it be zero is a little unrealistic.

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This grossly exaggerated risk of violence in schools comes with a big risk to kids with mental illness or kids who are just different. If you expel 10,000 kids to prevent one shooting, is it worth it? Before you give a knee jerk answer that saving a life is worth any cost, consider this.

24,000 kids will die from driving accidents.
5,000 kids will die from alcohol or drug use.
500 kids will die from drowning.
120 kids will die from school sports.

and

30 kids will die from school shootings each year.

So if your idea really is to do whatever it takes to save every life, we should cancel prom, keep kids from driving, keep them away from the beach and eliminate school sports.

This overreaction doesn't make sense, and it hurts kids.

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My niece is not normal (I think she would be happy with me saying so). She has no desire to be normal. She dresses in black including her fingernails. She wears a pentagram and at times she says she worships Satan.

And she is a great kid who is quite smart and with a cool group of goth friends and a wicked sense of humor. She got sent to the office for writing about drinking the blood of her enemies by an idiot English teacher with zero sense of humor. We, her family, all laughed and stood by her.

She ended up in a program for gifted kids, and she joking says she is upset that now she can't shock her teachers who just play along with her .

Forcing conformity is the safest way to have a society. But conformity comes with its own costs, and in my view conformity isn't worth the price.

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@maxdancona,

Because it's a violent crime committed by a minor to other unsuspecting minors and it's horrifying.

1 Reply

@Mame,

Mame wrote:

Because it's a violent crime committed by a minor to other unsuspecting minors and it's horrifying.

Why are stories only sensationalized when White people are involved? If violence were the issue, you would expect these national panics to happen no matter who was involved.

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@maxdancona,

I'm not getting into the colour issue with you because this is not about colour. I think it's safe to say if it had been a minority that shot up the school it would have gotten the same attention.

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@Mame,

The question is why some killings of teens are national headlines and others are largely ignored. It is absolutely about race. Look at the statistics.

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@maxdancona,

Actually there is a question. You don't know everything. Region to region, editor to editor... big difference. You are, once again, attributing your stuff to others. Why are some killings of teens are national headlines??? It's because it's not the norm, as you yourself pointed out, and especially when we grew up - it is news, no matter what colour does it. All horrific events are reported on.

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@Mame,

It is bad journalism. No one is saying how incredibly rare this is, and people are being intentionally given the idea that school shootings are endemic.

If journalists would point out that school shootings are exceedingly rare, it would be better. That wouldn't be a good story (I really think the phrase "sexy story" would be appropriate.

Instead we are getting a gross overreaction from all sides.

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@maxdancona,

Any 'gross overreaction' is that four innocent kids went to school and died at the hands of another minor. This is becoming so commonplace that it's become a ritual to set up the tributes. There is something very, very wrong when this happens so frequently. It is not "exceedingly rare" - it's becoming more "exceedingly common". What kind of signs are you looking at/for? What is it about this that you cannot see? How many times did this happen when you were in high school? That this does not generate headlines in 36 font with !!!! tells you it is not abnormal - it is becoming the norm that somewhere someone will shoot up a school. Don't minimize or diminish this with your damn numbers. It is not about NUMBERS, max. It's about what we're becoming accustomed to.

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@Mame,

Quote:

This is becoming so commonplace that it's become a ritual to set up the tributes.

This is factually incorrect. It is not becoming more commonplace. Thereay be an uptick because of covid. But even so, the odds are 1 on 2 million. This is exceedingly unlikely and getting more unlikely since the 1990s.

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

Quote:

"Schools are safer today than they had been in previous decades," says James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University who has studied the phenomenon of mass murder since the 1980s.

Fox and doctoral student Emma Fridel crunched the numbers, and the results should come as a relief to parents.

First, while multiple-victim shootings in general are on the rise, that's not the case in schools. There's an average of about one a year — in a country with more than 100,000 schools.

"There were more back in the '90s than in recent years," says Fox. "For example, in one school year — 1997-98 — there were four multiple-victim shootings in schools."

Second, the overall number of gunshot victims at schools is also down. According to Fox's numbers, back in the 1992-93 school year, about 0.55 students per million were shot and killed; in 2014-15, that rate was closer to 0.15 per million.

"The difference is the impression, the perception that people have," Fox says — and he traces that to cable news and social media. "Today we have cell phone recordings of gunfire that play over and over and over again. So it's that the impression is very different. That's why people think things are a lot worse now, but the statistics say otherwise."

Other experts agree. Garen Wintemute is an emergency room physician who leads a prominent gun violence research program at the University of California, Davis. He says school shootings, specifically, are not epidemic.

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/15/593831564/the-disconnect-between-perceived-danger-in-u-s-schools-and-reality

Here is the DOE data. This is deaths (compared to Hightor's combined "deaths and injuries") which explains the slight discrepancy. Either way it is a very small number.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/figures/A01/Figure_1.1_flat.svg[img]

[/img]

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10 years.
180 school shootings.
356 victims.

2009 through 2018

Quote:

Over the past decade, there were at least 180 shootings at K-12 schools across the US. They happened in big cities and in small towns, at homecoming games and during art classes, as students are leaving campus in the afternoon and during late-night arguments in school parking lots.

And they are happening more often.

CNN analyzed locations, time of day, type of school and student demographics to better understand how this trauma grips the country. While school shootings disproportionately affect urban schools and people of color, mass shootings are more likely to occur at white, suburban schools.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/07/us/ten-years-of-school-shootings-trnd/

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