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Tell me you’re a foreign intelligence agent without saying you’re a foreign intelligence agent.

That is the poorest decision making I’ve ever even heard of. You left the largest, most stable economy in human history - one that is insulated from any serious geopolitical threat by oceans - because you got spooked by scary news stories?

Great job hamstringing your kids.

People are fucking nuts. You have to think that at some point the thought would occur to them that they shouldn’t be slipping a knife into little Timmy’s backpack.

Closing the asylums was a mistake.

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Not ridiculous, the odds of either event injuring or killing any particular individual are vanishingly small. A person who worries about school shootings should be positively terrified of climbing ladders or crossing a busy road.

People are really bad at contextualizing risk. Just look at the “stranger danger” scare.

It isn’t OK, every single case is a crime.

There was a newsworthy incident where a cop managed to pull off a negligent discharge. Nobody got hurt, but guess what? Still a school shooting.

Tomato, to-illegal.

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Oh no, you described cause and effect! It has nothing to do with what I said, but it’s truly devastating.

Lemmy is full of raving lunatics.

And that figure is inflated. The School Shootings That Weren’t https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent

When people hear “school shootings” they imagine events like Columbine, even when that’s not what’s being counted. Literally every time a gun is fired at a school regardless of circumstances, it’s a school shooting. This includes cases where nobody is injured, the event happens after hours, or the people involved are unaffiliated with the school. Seriously, the NPR article I linked mentions a case where a guy killed himself in the parking lot of a building owned by the school district (that had not had students in it for years). That counted as a school shooting.

The sort of event people imagine IS more common than tornadoes, and even stupid, unrelated incidents that result in injuries is ALSO more common than tornadoes. The fact remains that there are not 400 Columbines a year. The chances of a particular student dying of any violent means on school property is vanishingly small. People worried about their kids getting killed in a school shooting should also worry about meteor and lightning strikes.

And in that example, people would still be foolish to panic.

The US is a nation that covers half a continent and has a third of a billion people. The lifetime odds of getting murdered by a stranger versus literally any other way to die?

Any person who rides in an automobile runs a greater risk of death. If you’re not clutching at your sheets in terror at the thought of getting in a car, you shouldn’t worry about getting killed by a random person.

And when I was a kid we had tornado drills. Schools got hit by tornados, but it was a freak incident that was ultimately an overblown fear.

If only there was some parallel we could draw here…

Are you high? Is this your first day on Lemmy?

If somebody worries about serial killers they have an objectively bad grasp on reality.

Are you nuts? How could you possibly conclude that that’s what I’m saying?

And I’m saying most level-headed people don’t worry about school shootings.

While I’m sure other parents do worry about that, they’re also the kind of people who worry about serial killers.

I’m not arguing that, especially because that figure includes suicides.

I’ve noticed that (especially on Lemmy) people outside the US think we’re dodging bullets as we go about our days. Really, everybody is just doing their own thing and minding their own business.

Your perceptions about the experience of the average American are a long way from accurate. You might want to take a hard look at the media you’re consuming.

EDIT: I have now discovered that the fastest way to kick the Lemmy hornet’s nest is to say you aren’t living in constant terror of being mowed down at random. How do you people function out in public? Do you even go out in public? This place is a fucking hole.

Never run for office. I implore you.