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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

There are a couple comments confounded by the normalization of active shooter training, but (as is often the case with these comments), I can't tell from the wording if they disagree with the practice or are merely upset (understandably) that such a thing is even necessary.

I guess the answer in both cases is the same, though: An unfortunate reality is still a reality.

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It isn't. The number of children that die in school shootings is an average of 35 per year. That is of course horrible, but in comparison to other sources of childhood death it's tiny. 150 a year die of food allergies. Eight are killed by lightning every year. Does lightning get 1/4 as much attention as school shootings despite causing 1/4 as many deaths?

Even comparing, very specifically, intentional firearm homicide of children outside of school to school shooting deaths shows that, per hour, schools are fantastically safer than when kids aren't at school. The US has a gun violence problem but school shootings are just a barely-audible echo of it.

The problem is that a child getting killed by lightning doesn't leave behind a community of survivors and loved ones who go on a crusade against lightning. School shootings lead to political activism, and that activism has been met with a stone wall for decades. Hardly an inch has been given, and the school shootings continue.

They're now finding creative ways around the wall that was constructed, to do something -- anything -- and again it's treated as a big, unnecessary inconvenience. The longer people stand in the way of reasonable reform, the more creative (read: unreasonable) the proposed reforms will become.

It seems like it would increase the number of shootings by putting the idea in children's heads.

And/or how to predict the reaction and behaviour of people in an event like that.

Some of the "anti-training" sentiment comes from concern that the drills themselves can be very traumatic for children who are already trying to understand the real shootings that they hear about.

It's very hard to measure/analyze the risk from drills vs. the risk from no drills, especially if the rate of shootings is changing over time.

I neither disagree with the practice, nor am upset by it. In fact this HN thread is the first time in my life (I'm in my 30s) that I've even heard about it. And I have worked in the past with firearm training companies. It's just something entirely new to me right now, if you can believe that.

I am upset that this is necessary, and even more upset that everybody accepts this "status quo" as normal and the (usually very timid) calls to do something about it only lead to more guns being sold.

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