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Comment by elamje | Hacker News Reader

I do agree that news channels rarely cover the statistically significant story such as motor vehicle deaths, etc. However, I think their coverage pattern has a lot more to do with their incentive to maximize their own profit and tell the most inflammatory/engaging story. Cars killing someone isn’t as flashy as a man with a gun.

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Provided there is some kind of malicious activity, like drunk driving or manufacturer negligence, I find there to be quite a bit of media coverage of motor vehicle deaths. I'd guess that our perception is that they don't cover it because there are so many distinct events which get short 1 minute nightly news stories, while school shootings tend to result in longer, more focused coverage.

Cars killing people also usually do not have a wide reaching effect beyond the community it happened in.

I don't think that the particular cause of death has a dramatic impact on the wideness of the reach of the effect.

Well, it certainly does. 23 kids dying in a shooting incident is a lot more impactful than 3000 kids dying across the nation. One impacts nearly everyone with kids in a geographical area (many will need counseling), the other only impacts a couple families in a given geographical area.

> 23 kids dying in a shooting incident

I don't even know what you're referring to here. Sandy Hook I guess? That was 27. Other than that, there have been no mass shootings in schools with that many children killed since 1927.

I was using 2018 numbers - 23 is the total number of people killed in mass shootings in or near schools throughout the US that year. It hurts to say this, but I think the sober reality is that this is a very small problem, affecting very few people. On the other hand, every community in the country is impacted by automobile impacts killing children.

I disagree thoroughly. Murder always affects those metrics much more than accident. Mass murder more than individual crimes of passion. Freak accidents more than common accidents. Et cetera.

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