Thursday, February 15, 2018

PROBABILITIES AND SCHOOL SHOOTINGS 2013-FEB. 2018

I'm afraid I have given up on any sort of gun control: (http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2017/10/when-did-i-give-up-on-gun-control.html)

Below is a figure on school shootings in the U.S. for 2013 through February 15, 2018.  To activate the hover action, see the reference.*

(Click on image to enlarge)

So there has been another mass murder school shooting* and there are again calls to do something.  But our President signed a bill soon after his inauguration to remove mentally ill people from prohibition to buy guns.  Also, there is a bill before Congress to permit someone with a gun carry permit to be valid in ALL states, no matter what the states think.

Curiously, one of the calls is to reestablish the bill for the mentally ill to be blocked from gun purchases.

So nothing is going to happen that will attempt to even solve a part of the problem.  Even now, there are as many gun deaths as automobile collision deaths annually in America and Nothing is even being tried to reduce gun deaths whereas the self-driving car is being developed that will reduce automobile deaths and injuries.  I'm sure that even with the present state of development of self-driving cars that deaths and injuries would be reduced.

But parents and students can take some comfort in the probabilities of not being killed or injured by guns in school or movie theaters.  There are thousands of schools in America and the probability that your school will be hit is low.**  And even if your school is selected for mass murder, the probability that you will survive without death or injury is high.  For example, in the current Florida school shooting, 17 were killed and 14 injured (latest figures) in a school of 3,000 students where 2,969 survived.  The same sort of thing is also true of the Las Vagas shooting.***

There is no doubt that if you were a student at the school, you could be mentally injured and not only by having nightmares for a while after the shooting.  I suspect a year from now, students of that school will have PTSD and feel fear and depression and have trouble knowing why.  I know this from first-hand knowledge, not from gun violence but from being beaten up, an incident that I eventually remembered (I also had a second incident dealing with mining****). My PTSD lasted only one year.  Students experiencing a school or movie theater shooting may not be so lucky.

* https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/15/florida-school-shooting-just-the-latest-in-an-ongoing-series-of-tragedies.html
** Aurora, Colorado, seems to be an exception although the first incident was at a Chucky Cheese in 1993 and the second was in a movie theater in 2012.  Neither of these was in a high school; however, the famous Columbine High School, CO, shooting was in 1999.   There was also an Arapahoe High School shooting eight miles from Columbine High in 2013.  A list of shhotings in Colorado is given at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_in_Colorado and hints at the Colorado Springs shooting on January 1, 2018.
*** At least 59 people are dead and 527 injured after a shooting late Sunday at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, where the Route 91 Harvest country music festival attended by 22,000. (http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/route-91-harvest-music-festival/story?https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7981929/las-vegas-shooting-mandalay-bay; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting)
**** http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/01/working-underground-my-rational-self.html

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