School shootings are unacceptably frequent in the US, regardless of how infrequent they are in an absolute sense. Many countries go decades without a single school shooting.
I don’t understand your comment. It seems to boil down to “they are obviously too frequent, regardless of how frequent they are”. Is that a fair summary?
Anyway, in principle any death for any reason is unacceptable. In reality, however, we need to decide how to allocate limited resources to making various classes of death less likely. Given that dying in a mass school shooting is much less likely than dying from a lightning strike, and is about as difficult to prevent[0], it doesn’t make any sense to focus on.
[0]: No, we can’t just “make guns illegal”. The political structure of the US makes this impossible.
I mean that they are vastly more frequent in the US than in any vaguely comparable country. It would be as if, e.g., 100x more Americans died of electric shocks than Europeans. This would suggest that something fixable was wrong.
You have to prioritize your problems and solve the ones that give you the most bang for your buck. I'm sure there are magnitudes more shark attacks in USA than in EU, but that doesn't instantly mean we should prioritize reducing shark attacks - the cost-to-value ratio of solving that problem is terrible.
America has a lot of problems. I would say school shootings are not terribly high on the list. Same with mass shootings. Gun violence is a very touchy subject in America, as outright bans violate the 2A of the constitution which many believe was inspired to protect against formation of tyranny. Personally, I see the value in citizens being able to own rifles; not so much with handguns (which seem to only be used for murder and suicide).
But imagine if Hong Kong had 2A rights. Protests would be much more violent, yes, but the violence would be up-front instead of postponed until the next revolution (an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure...). Beijing would be forced to either back off or straight up invade. Instead, I predict HK's rights will be slowly eroded in a war of attrition until they are all trapped under the tyranny of the CCP for generations to come (which is arguably worse than up-front violence).
You work on whatever problem you like. I simply pointed out that the US has a singular problem with school shootings. You appear to agree with that assessment.
You have no idea what would happen if Hong Kong had "2A rights".
> You have no idea what would happen if Hong Kong had "2A rights".
Right, because they don't. Just like every other country that slips into tyranny. The absence of 2A rights in countries ruled by tyrannical regimes is deafening.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. There are free countries with tight gun control laws and tyrannies with high levels of private gun ownership. There's no connection between the two things.
The framing of this comparison is fraught due to unequal bucketing. Most other countries are the size of US states or even cities, so they can boast individually low numbers while in the US everything gets bundled together. The US should instead be compared to something like all of Europe or all of Western Europe.
Sure, but what difference does that make? The US still comes out way ahead in school shootings if you compare it to all of Europe. And e.g. the UK has about 1/5th of the population of the US but vastly less than 1/5th as many school shootings. I don't think you can really have thought this through if you think that "bucketing" is the issue.
I suppose I'm conflating school shootings with mass shootings which is what most people worry about, a la Columbine or Parkland. The figures in your link are mostly gang violence, which is a completely separate although valid issue.
We do absolutely have higher rates of targeted gang violence than other countries, which after controlling for factors like density and poverty is highly correlated to young urban male demographics that aren't as prevalent in other developed nations. There is no single policy that can solve the numerous social and systemic failures that generate this problem, but due to the nature of these vendettas they would assuredly be carried out with knives and shanks in the absence of guns.
