Do you know what the composition of the other 98% looks like? i.e. accidental firings at home, murders, suicides, etc?

The CDC does an amazing job of gather stats on what kills people in the USA. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm and those statistics have a section on child mortality.

Interesting, by gathering data on what kills people, they inadvertently also gather data on how dangerous guns are.

Although, props to the CDC. That is some serious data gathering, cleaning etc. Most countries don't have that level of detail. At least not publically available.

Beware of comparing the data with other countries as the definition for what looks like the same terms is hidden in the details. Infant mortality is one area where there are some fundamental differences in definition (yeah, this is a surprise). Guns are a far cry in danger from quite a lot of activities.

Thanks!

I restricted my comparison to homicides only. They're basically statistically insignificant compared to the other much more common causes of child firearm death.

Thanks, sorry, misread. Was asking because am curious about how the deaths break down overall as this would affect what we might want to focus on when attempting to reduce them.

@Causalityl , @jranmer - question for both of you (or whoever) - at what rate of death if any would it become appropriate to do these types of drills and why?

I don’t know where the line is, but I think I would sooner pull my kids out to homeschool than have them be further traumatized/militarized by letting them participate in active shooter drills. It’s insane and will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you expose kids to this kind of lifestyle, the more it becomes... part of their lifestyle.

Yeah, that came to mind for me as well / seems like a pretty serious drawback to say the least.

Yeah, look how utterly ruined we were because we had nuclear bomb drills(!) and earthquake drills.

I know you were being sarcastic but you might be accidentally right. Have you seen the level of fear mongering in politics and a lack of regard for the future from the eras when they existed? I think the nuclear bomb drills may have really ruined them - that or the leaded gasoline.The 'I turned out just fine insistence' is often seen from people who support beating the pattern of abuse in beating their children.

I'm not trying to be a snide jackass here - I suspect it had real deleterious effects but they were normalized and went uncommented upon. The Black Death appeared to have some similar precedent as western culture became utterly desensitized to skeletons and 'the end is nigh' beliefs became a sizeable reoccurring minority to majority. I believe Rome had similar beliefs as some saw the writing on the wall of their decline. I'm not an expert but I wouldn't be surprised it died out in the dark ages as people were in the actual 'post apocalypse' and doing things like former Roman seamen founding Venice.

What, you don’t recall the rash of school earthquakings children did after those drills became commonplace? All the nuclear mail bombings?

Oh that’s right, people can’t cause earthquakes and nuclear bombs are a bit tricky to make. Whereas there are millions of guns circulating right now and even toddlers manage to off themselves with them at a nonzero rate.

I’m a gun supporting liberal, and I say something is wrong with our culture.

The answer isn't dependent on rate of death.

It's based on when we start teaching children to heal through trauma, as well as take responsibility for and learn to release their emotions.

These drills are simply trauma fuel. They're irresponsible actions taken by irresponsible, fear-driven adults who think they know what kids need when they themselves don't know how to be ok in an horrific situation or how to heal from it without developing toxic behaviors...

Toxic behaviors like the kind that traumatize children further.

The fact that you reach for those analogies should tell you that maybe these drills aren't exactly the best.

Nobody said they couldn't handle them. I said it's traumatizing.

And so were all the things you just mentioned.

I'm ready to be a part of the generation where we learned to heal, not merely handle. I wish that for my child, too.

When there aren't far more productive ways to spend that time. For instance, teaching and reinforcing the wearing of seatbelts, talking to kids about domestic abuse, or even just child gun safety like not picking them up and playing with them.

Makes sense. I suppose no need trying to quantify more specifically if we're nowhere near that line.

Schools do all that. Now what?

Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe, and Red Lake are the mass shootings of my lifetime to take place in schools. Virginia Tech and another community college also saw mass shootings, if you want to include tertiary education.

Note that three of these are in the top 10 (and 2 in the top 5) if you rank them by deaths.

Homicide isn't even in the top 10 ways to die in the US. The students are in more danger from drowning, by a wide margin, than any school shooting.

https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/w...

In Australia at least this is an area we are getting worse at (https://lsv.com.au/research/water-competency-of-victorian-ch...). 3 out of 5 fail the current standard of swimming continuously for 50 meters at the end of primary school. The standard has dropped too, ~25 years ago when I was tested the standard was 200 meters and most of the "training" happened in unstructured time.

That's disappointing. I feel like being able to swim and handle ocean surf is a "birthright" of Aussie kids. I remember being taken out in fairly big crashing surf as young as 5 and 6 years old by my parents so I could learn how to handle it (dive under breaking waves, judge currents, etc).

I would guess the trend is not so bad in Queensland. One thing that is very impressive here is the number of pools in schools, including public schools, and the very, very active swim programs that go with them. Brisbane probably has one of the best swimming cultures in the world (backed up by the number of swimmming champions that have come from here).

I grew up on the Gold Coast and definitely enjoyed that birthright, playing in the ocean shallows from before I could walk, doing nippers at age 6, etc, but I believe the Queensland standard has also dropped to 50m. I don't think many public schools there have pools even now though, it was almost all private ones when I was a kid. A big differentiator in Qld was the huge number of backyard pools, but they seem to be disappearing as Qld catches up population wise with the southern states, not to mention costs with recent droughts.

Watching my nephews that nature of their swimming seems to be a bit different, for me we were riding or bikes to pools/beaches by ourselves from the age of about 9, they live in Brisbanes suburbia and have to be driven to a pool/beach and then supervised. They're largely left to their own merits once they get there, but it's more of a family thing than a friends thing and they don't have to learn there own dispute resolution and the like, nor do they get to decide when to go and when to leave.

Yes they did. They are also a tiny drop in the bucket of child gun homicides, an even smaller drop for child gun deaths, and an incredibly small bump in child deaths overall.

Active shooter drills aren't about preventing child gun homicides. They're about active shooter situations inside schools, which are actual events that have happened.

You may debate how useful they are, or if the frequency of school shootings is sufficient to justify them, but I will point out that the number of times I have had to evacuate a school (admittedly, due to a bomb threat) is equal to the number of times we had to "assume the position" for a tornado threat (exactly once).

As far as I know, there’s also no evidence that active shooter drills make students safer.