Not particularly surprising after the recent NY bill which will require gun owners to share their social media logins and search engine history with the state. Sometimes the slope really is slippery.
Then spying, tracking, censorship of "offensive" or "unpatriotic" words depending on your political side for little gain of the little people. Of course, the state won't do anything to actually reduce mass shooting, they profit of fear and hate. History doesn't repeat, it is remixed.
Risk assessment fundamentally about probability and impact.
We took measures to get serious about drunk driving because it increased the probability of car accidents, especially at night,and was killing people.
On the flip side, we mandate tamper evident seals in medicine because the rare event of tampering hurt a small number of people, but undermined the citizens faith in the institutions they depend on.
The mass shooting issue is like the pill bottle problem. It’s a serious matter with an obvious solution. At the end of the day, it’s a problem unleashed by marketing — as hunting and shooting sport participation evaporated, gunmakers were left with a problem. Now we have batshit crazy people with political power, which is a genie that will be difficult to put back in the bottle.
Lots of things are vanishingly rare, the odds of being in a mass shooting are a lot less vanishingly rare then I am comfortable with. If the odds were up near where tornado deaths are I'd prefer it. The numbers I saw gave a 1/11125 chance per year of being killed in a mass shooting in the US.
Yeah that number is outright false for "mass shootings". This figure originates from the approximate 33k people that are killed by firearms per year. Of that number, somewhere around 23k are individual suicides with firearms. Of the remaining approximate 10k deaths, 80% are gang related incidents. Source is the FBI UCR.
I think they're probably quoting the chance over a lifetime, assuming rates stay the same. According to Wikipedia, 382 people died in mass shootings in 2018.
Gang violence is often included in mass shooting statistics, and rightfully so, but depending on the depiction or commercial are not shown as such. On the other side of the coin, often times, gang crime is taken out of mass shooting statistical data, making it look far less likely, but more realistic to rich, white, suburban targeted audiences that politicians tend to advertise to. Neither is a lie, but both data sets are "massaged" to suit political narratives popular with particular bases.
Only if you use the perversely tight definition of 4 or more people killed (not including the shooter), not in a robbery, not as part of gang violence, not as part of domestic violence, and not including sponsored terrorist events, on the same day in close geographical proximity.
As soon as you drop some of those requirements the numbers increase dramatically.
