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42 sats \ 2 replies \ @stack_harder OP 3h \ parent \ on: How safe do you feel in America? AskSN
i mean, it is way more common in the US than seemingly anywhere else though (shool shootings, not always mass school shootings).
I don't give it a ton of thought, since you know, i'm not there, but asked chatgpt:
-Using the K-12 School Shooting Database (very broad: gun brandished/fired or bullet hits school property), there were ≈1,468 incidents in the past decade, a ~324% jump vs. the prior decade.
Other trackers use stricter definitions and get much smaller counts (e.g., Everytown’s “gunfire on school grounds,” Education Week’s K-12 list, and the Washington Post’s database). They all agree the trend rose sharply in recent years. -
Then i asked what other countries rank in the school shooting list and it gave me this
*There isn’t a single, reliable global database with apples-to-apples rates. The best-known cross-country snapshot (CNN’s compilation Jan-2009→May-2018; incidents with ≥1 person shot) shows the U.S. far ahead and the next countries a tiny fraction of that:
United States — 288
Mexico — 8
South Africa — 6
Pakistan — 4
Nigeria — 4
could still be an interesting research project i think
Notice that CNN is including "gun brandished", which is not a shooting. These metrics are really tricky when you start parsing them and it doesn't help that many outlets are intentionally misleading in how they report them.
There are a lot of gang related incidents on or near school grounds in the kinds of neighborhoods I said needed to be avoided. Most researchers don't include those as mass shootings, though, and they only count them as school shootings if they happen during school hours with targets in the student population.
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If there's one thing that, as a social scientist, I'd like to communicate to the world, it's this:
Sociological data has to be collected and produced by someone, and the entity producing it is often not a neutral scientific observer. It is usually either a government agency or an interested third party. Moreover, different jurisdictions tend to have different data collection procedures, making cross country comparisons difficult
That's not to say you should distrust every report using sociological data, but it does mean that you should always have in the back of your mind how these statistics were collected and produced. It's often harder than you think to collect an accurate picture of what's going on.
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