The real question here isn't "why are we sacrificing the education of the next generation to buy tools that make us feel safe but (logically, statistically) will only prevent one in a million child deaths?" ... the answer to that is a Simpsons meme ("won't someone think of the children?").

The real question is ... who is stoking the irrational fear in the first place, and how do they benefit by doing so?

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nonethewiser an hour ago | parent [-]

What are you talking about? Schools are targets for shooters. Sad but certainly not fake.

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pjscott an hour ago | parent [-]

There are school shootings and they’re certainly awful. Similarly, people sometimes get struck by lightning, and this is awful too. But if your goal is to prevent deaths, rather than to focus on the things that make for the most lurid news stories, then there are boring things like road safety that loom much larger in the numbers than they do in the public imagination. Here are some numbers on causes of death for children and adolescents in the US, reported by the CDC:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6637963/

Figures for deaths from school shootings are harder to come by, since it seems like all the sources are trying to push some political narrative or other, but the highest numbers I could find were in the low double digits per year (on average). Preventing those doesn’t strike me as a high-priority use of limited death-prevention resources.

	▲	rationalist 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		For a lot of people, emotions are more important than pragmatism.