Most school shootings aren’t mass killings, study finds, and they’re often driven by community violence | CNN
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Many Americans think of school shootings as mass casualty events involving an adolescent with an assault-style weapon. But a new study says that most recent school shootings orchestrated by teenagers do not fit that image — and they are often related to community violence.

Many Americans think of school shootings as mass casualty events involving an adolescent with an assault-style weapon. But a new study says that most recent school shootings orchestrated by teenagers do not fit that image — and they are often related to community violence.

The study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, analyzed 253 school shootings carried out by 262 adolescents in the US between 1990 and 2016.

It found that these adolescents were responsible for only a handful of mass casualty shootings, defined as those involving four or more gunshot fatalities. About half of the shootings analyzed — 119 — involved at least one death. Among the events, seven killed four or more people.

A majority of the shootings analyzed also involved handguns rather than assault rifles or shotguns, and they were often the result of “interpersonal disputes,” according to the researchers from University of South Carolina and University of Florida.

  • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
    1·
    8 months ago

    People start stabbing each other

    Even giving you a free pass on that actually being true, stabbings are both easier to flee and less lethal. It would be a genuine improvement

    Then you have to start trying to take all the knives. Then the clubs. Then bottles, and bricks, and hammers, and screwdrivers.

    Isn’t it just fascinating that this slippery slope always starts at “guns”?

    Somehow, it’s impossible to stop at “lets not sell guns to idiots and psychopaths” like sane people. Once we start down that road, we have to just keep banning more and more things forever, despite the fact none of those things are covered by the second amendment and could be banned right now if we actually wanted to.

    You may as well be claiming “Driving under the influence? What next? Driving sober? Bikes? Horses? Legs?”.

    You’re never going to be able to take all of the tools that people use to commit murder, because “bare hands” account for something like 5% of all homicides in the US

    Meanwhile, guns account for 81% of those homicides because they’re more lethal, in less time, with less chance of escaping or being interrupted.

    Most of the guns used in those homicides are legally purchased, but that’s mostly academic given that 99% of guns used in crimes were originally legally purchased from dealers, pawnbrokers or manufacturers, clearly demonstrating that the background checks and storage laws are not even remotely adequate.

    You keep accidentally admitting how much better things would be if Americas had gun laws in line with the rest of the world, instead of pretending every murder is inevitable like you wanted.

    Fix the underlying problems, and most of that violence–the violence that turns into murder–ends up going away on it’s own.

    Sure. Let us know when you’re done building that utopia so we can look at actual crime stats that actually exist, rather than fantasy statistics that the pro-gun community insists will come true eventually.

    Until then, why do you staunchly oppose measures designed to reduce the number of murderers armed with the tools you openly admit are best-in-class for murder?