‘Run, Hide, Fight’ Is Not How Our Brains Work
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Going back to 2010, there have been 182 fatalities[1] in the United States due to mass shootings.
In the same amount of time, there have been about 158 fatalities due to being struck by lightning.[2]
In 2013 alone, there were 611,105 fatalities due to heart disease and 56,979 due to influenza and pneumonia.[3] The stats are a bit out of date, but from 2005-2009, ~3,500 people drowned (in "non-boating accidents") each year.[4]
If you're worried about yourself or a loved one dying, don't worry about dying in a mass shooting. It's about as likely as being struck by lightning.
[1]: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-m...
[2]: http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/fatalities.shtml
[3]: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
[4]: http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Water-Safety/wa...
* Fatalities due to being struck by lightning are largely avoidable by educating oneself on how to behave around a lightning storm. http://hikingdude.com/hiking-lightning.php
* Fatalities due to illnesses occur mostly in old people, after the child bearing years. It's much easier to cope with the death of a parent than it is with the death of a child.
For young people that don't engage in reckless behavior, you have not refuted that mass shooting are unfortunately a comparatively large risk.
#1 for 25-34: unintentional injury with 16,209 deaths.
#2 for 25-34: suicide, 6,348 deaths (but if you don't engage in risky behavior, you wouldn't commit suicide, right?)
#3 for 25-34, homicide, 4,236 deaths - the vast majority of these are _not_ in mass-shooting incidents, of course.
#4 is cancer (3,673 deaths) and #5 is heart disease (3,258 deaths).
By the way, for felony homicides, the majority (69.1%) are perpetrated against a single victim[2].
[1] (PDF warning): http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_deat...
[2]: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/...
If we want people to react well in extreme situations, it's not enough to simply tell them what to do; we must give them practical experience to replace their instincts with better instincts.
Israel provides this sort of training for their citizens. The question we have to ask is whether such training would be appropriate for our societies.
But why is it that of all the nations in the civilized world only in the US do the nutjobs go on armed rampages? Why is the origin of nutcases shooting with firearms taken as a given? In the article their existence is taken as an accepted fact; it just talks about how to protect oneself from them.
How about reducing the incidence of people running amok with guns, either by restricting guns or reducing whatever precipitates the killing spree? I'm frankly sick of "personal responsibility", it's usually a sign of someone else failing to do their job.
Per the article, the United States "tops the charts" only in number of deaths by mass shooting. In terms of death per capita (a slightly more meaningful, but still largely meaningless metric) the US falls from the number one spot to the number 4 spot among the 11 countries studied.
But the primary flaw with studies relating mass shootings is that they almost always start with the assumption that guns are the root cause.
A more appropriate metric is deaths per capita for mass killings.
It is a tautology that were guns are more readily available, mass killers will more often choose to use guns; but the implication that because guns are available there will be more mass killings is demonstrably false. Mass killers have already chosen to kill. In the absence of easily available guns, they most often seem to use arson.
Gun control might be useful, but it is not the panacea that the media and politicians are describing. FYI, access to firearms in Israel and Switzerland is actually easier than in the US, and yet there are fewer (essentially no) mass shootings[0] -- and Paris has much stricter gun control than the either. It's not as simple as recent political speeches make it.
[0] I'm ignoring anything related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - that one's a war, shooting is to be expected, unfortunately.
It is harder to buy a weapon in Israel than in some parts of the US (though, likely easier than NY or NJ), but _accessing_ a weapon is easier. And I say that having lived in both countries.
I was not aware that Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Germany, and company were part of the United States.
> Why is the origin of nutcases shooting with firearms taken as a given? In the article their existence is taken as an accepted fact; it just talks about how to protect oneself from them.
You've reached a strange conclusion here. Mass shootings (and other types of mass killings) happpen. Taking responsibility for your personal safety is simply prudent. You, individually, can probably not prevent all or even one mass shooting from occuring (perhaps, if you are very lucky, you could stop ONE mass shooting in your lifetime). You can, however, make sure you are prepared to keep yourself safe from mass shootings and other dangerous situations.
The fact is, we haven't taken a serious look at the causes of mass shootings. It's a difficult problem with no clear solutions.
Gun control advocates muddy the waters further by blaming the attacks on the availability of guns, even though there is ample evidence that guns only turn the phrase "mass killing" into the phrase "mass shooting". The term "mass shooting" itself is largely political. We don't talk about "mass burnings" when people are killed with arson or "mass poisonings" when people are attack with poison gas.
Not so sure about that. Did you hear about the following? A crazy guy with a knife might kill or seriously would a handful of people at most. With a gun the number of deaths is likely to be much higher.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/dec/05/suspect-custo...
>We don't talk about "mass burnings" when people are killed with arson or "mass poisonings" when people are attack with poison gas.
The phrase "mass poisoning" is in fact used, but in accord with the usual meaning of "poisoning" tends to be restricted to cases where poison was introduced into food or water. "Mass burning" is not used simply because English does not typically use the noun "burning" to refer to deaths by burning.
> I'm frankly sick of "personal responsibility"
Only on HN.
Fire/bomb/attack drills are practiced by children starting at first grade, and go all the way through school. Most 18 year olds go into the army, and get (at least) basic training in weapons, hand to hand combat, first aid, "operating and taking orders under stress" -- both boys and girls. The entire country conducts a large scale drill of some sort approximately once a year.
It's very hard to tell if any of them is useful or useless, if they stand alone or only together, and essentially how effective they are.
I don't know what you regard as "our societies", but when I was working in the city of london, there was a fire drill every month (and one month, every wednesday - I don't remember why). I couldn't find anyone who knew the history, but the prevailing thought among the people I inquired with was that this goes back either to world war 2 or the great fire of london (1666).
My instinct during a stabbing attack I witnessed was to run towards the danger. But I'm not sure what that has to do with the fire drills you mention, those are a vestigial leftover from wars-of-attrition scenarios.
In my opinion not freezing up (or unfreezing faster) is a matter of experience and can't be replicated with country wide training. Sounds about as useful as duck-and-cover videos from the cold war era.
Also, living this way is not desirable in and of itself and "your societies" are not in proximity to war zones. Just control your firearms.
In normal situations the human mind is a lot more complex. But in stress situations, it's actually a good description of a humans capabilities.