Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/22/us-public-schools-are-still-th.html
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My 13 year old son told me he has a special strategy all his own for surviving a school shooting. Hearing my son describe how he plans to out-clever a rampage killer.
He has a point, too–the rampage killers of tomorrow are just students today. These killers know every play in the school’s active shooter playbook. His goal is to zig when the killer expects him to zag.
I wish things were different.
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Well, duh. Soldiers are given very stringent training with their weapons, and those weapons are very carefully controlled.
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Why the hyphen in “combat-zones” ?
Combat zones should be more dangerous, but are not. How incredibly we are failing.
School shootings in America are appalling, but schools are not more dangerous than combat zones. Combat zones are far more dangerous. It’s true that we’ve had 26 students killed vs 11 service members. That’s horrible. However, from the PolitiFact article
There are currently an estimated 50.8 million students enrolled in K-12 classes. That’s vastly larger than the combination of personnel serving in the two military operations cited above, which is less than 20,000 people, according to publicly disclosed data.
So the death rate and the danger is much higher in combat zones. I wish I did not have to explain this for so many reasons.
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Seriously, as someone who very much supports gun control, publicising incorrect stats like this is not helping, it just gives gun advocates something to claim ‘fake news’ over.
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Confining the statistic to ‘soldiers in combat zones’ also helps. Quite a few people end up on the business end of those carefully controlled weapons; but taking care to ensure that it’s mostly not the ones your poll numbers will suffer for is a vital element of any technologically superior belligerent’s strategy when they have elections to consider.
If you did a shooter/shooter comparison the numbers would likely skew even further towards the schools; since surviving your spree killing is more a sign of incompetence than an objective, while surviving your deployment is typically the reverse; but a noncombatant/noncombatant comparison would shove things firmly into the combat zone’s camp. Sustained effort and high explosives are clearly more effective than your handful of minutes until the cops show up.
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The fact there needs to be a reminder of this is telling enough.
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Who’s most likely to be shot, a soldier on active duty or a high school kid?
How is this even a thing, let alone something to argue over. Who the fuck cares about appropriate statistical methodology. WE’RE SHOOTING OUR KIDS!
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Who the fuck cares about appropriate statistical methodology.
Facts matter. Reality matters.
Boing Boing consistently and rightfully pokes fun at the irrational and innumerate arguments that Republican lawmakers say to support their beliefs. We should not promote innumerate arguments just because they support our views.
The facts are on our side. We don’t have to lie or mislead to make our point here.
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I can find no point of entry to this conversation with Americans on either side of the debate. That it is a debate just shuts my brain down. YOU’RE SHOOTING YOUR KIDS! And all you want to do is argue angels on pinheads ffs.
IF the fateful days arrives when the eggheads in society get rounded up, first to go are Happy Mutants.
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