Mexico has some of the most stringent gun laws in the world. They also have more than four times the murder rate of the US. So while it's technically true that Mexicans have guns, this is more along the lines of "people inclined to violate the law against murder have no qualms about violating the law against unlawful possession of a firearm" rather than that it's easy to lawfully acquire a firearm in Mexico.
Practically anyone can own a shotgun in the UK, which also has restrictive gun laws. There has only ever been one school shooting (and the guy responsible owned his weapons completely legally).
What I'm saying is that gun control won't solve the problem, but it will help.
> What I'm saying is that gun control won't solve the problem, but it will help.
I still don't get how this is supposed to work.
It seems like there are two main categories of shootings. The first is the ones that most often make the news, i.e. school shootings. But the people who do this are typically people who snap rather than career criminals, and then they would pass the background check etc. Also, these are in practice a small minority of shooting deaths.
The second is gang violence. This is where you really get the high body counts. But it's also where gun laws aren't going to be followed, and then you get the same result as you do in Mexico, i.e. stringent laws that do nothing because drug cartels are already operating a criminal smuggling operation and don't give a crap about following gun laws.
The best argument I've heard in favor of "gun control" reducing fatalities is something like, if you make it inconvenient for normal people to have guns then fewer of them will do it and you get fewer accidents. But then there are any number of alternative ways to get a similar result, like subsidizing gun safes or training etc., which don't require you to fight the people you're otherwise intending to purposely inconvenience.
I am happy to inform you that the United States also does not have school shootings on an "almost daily basis". Not trying to be pedantic here, but gross exaggerations misrepresent the issue.
> GVA has reported 971 cases of school shootings across the United States in 2024, with many of them having no victims or injuries. The database has tracked 112 school shootings in which a victim was injured or killed.
Somewhere between ~3/day and ~0.3/day, depending what you count. Close enough.
USA Today's reporting is wrong. There are not 971 cases of school shootings. There are about that many "school incidents". Some of those incidents, like the one listed below, are where police responded to a report of someone with a gun and never found the person or gun.
Yes I have. An altercation between two people in a parking lot is different than a school shooting.
Have you looked at the other items listed where there are victims? Multiple times I see that it was an altercation in a dorm room of a college. Sorry, I would consider that an altercation in a residence, not a school shooting. Here's another one that a kid shot himself in the leg and it's counted as a school shooting.
Ah. I now understand why school shooting numbers that people are quoting are so very high as of late.
Shit like Columbine is a school shooting. Shit like that is a shooting that happened to happen at school. If the assailant had used a knife, would you be calling it a "school stabbing"? If you would, then I disagree with that characterization, too.
For lots of folks, the term "school shooting" is strongly associated with the notion that a massacre happened... and not at all with the notion that some folks got into a heated argument, and one of them decided to attack the other with a weapon.
Based on this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42552320> many things classified as "school shooting" are not what any reasonable person would think of when they hear the term.
A kid shooting HIMSELF in the leg? Yes, it meets an extremely literal definition, but it would be incredibly stupid to -say- lock down a campus because of that.
Issues of what constitutes a "school shooting" aside, my personal experience with GVA is that their database contains duplicate incidents and they will not actually correct those errors when pointed out.
They appear to have correctly filtered out the "Non-Shooting Incident" sort of results from it (which your picks appear to mostly be) to arrive at the ~900 numbers.
I've also been looking at the export, but I don't see any way to filter down to "Shooting incidents". Just sampling the first 10, 10% of 2000 is looking like way less.
Were you able to find a way to validate the 900 number?
Depends how you define school shooting as well. Click around on https://www.chds.us/sssc/data-map/ . There are numerous incidents like "Teacher killed himself in classroom after school hours" "Shots fired in the evening, no one injured".
Also, if you go into that data a total of 260 Students were fatally wounded by a firearm from 1970 to 2022 during the school day.
If this is accurate, the odds of being fatally shot as a student during school hours is extremely low, about 1 in 10,000,000 over the span of this data collection. Higher odds than winning a powerball jackpot, but, in context, an extremely rare event.
It wouldn't be a stretch to hypothesize that the administrators forcing students through metal detectors, doing active shooter drills, etc, are doing more net harm than the thing that they are attempting to defend against (as a purely utilitarian calculation).
It really depends on the definition of "school shooting". If you mean the type that makes national headlines where someone shoots a bunch of random people, then no it's not daily
If by "school shooting" you include all the people shot in or right next to schools, then yea it's almost daily (or at least every couple days or so). That includes fights escalating to guns, targeted shootings of single people due to whatever revenge.
Swiss also… everywhere. And the laws are not so different in the USA as the rest of the world as often portrayed. Also the violence all around the world is more uniform than many think or want to admit (if counted relative to people count) But a shooting in USA will be displayed everywhere while a shooting, say in Germany, will not be covered as much. Just in south germany (BW) there are a couple of people killed per week, but that is covered only occasionally, when at all, by very local newspapers.
> But a shooting in USA will be displayed everywhere...
No, it won't. Unless it's a very large or very notable one (school w/multiple deaths, lots of deaths, politician, etc.), it'll be a line item on the day's evening news for the local TV station. We have 10k+ a year, not "a couple per week". I don't even hear of most of the ~50/year that happen in my fairly small city.
> In 2017, compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related homicide rate was 25 times higher. Although the US has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, among those 22 nations studied, the U.S. had 82 percent of gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed with guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed with guns, with guns being the leading cause of death for children.
They don't have school shootings on an almost daily basis.
The problem is definitely not the guns. It doesn't help, but it's not the root cause.