
More Children Were Shot Dead in 2017 Than On-Duty Police Officers and Military - Tomte
https://www.newsweek.com/kids-and-guns-alarming-rise-firearm-deaths-among-american-children-1370866
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perl4ever
There are 1.4 million active duty members of the US military. There are about
0.8 million police officers "with general arrest powers". There are around 82
million children in the US.

So what the headline is saying, is that being a police officer or a soldier
appears to be less than 37 times as dangerous as being a child.

The implication appears to be that this is startlingly low, but how dangerous
do people think being a police officer _should_ be, in a world that operated
according to reasonable expectations? Would 40 times as dangerous be enough?

~~~
Svoka
Being in a police force of military involves having guns. Kids should not have
them, as far as I know. So, for me event 40x time is very high, I would expect
outliers - 500x+.

Also, we could compare results to other countries, where kids are not legally
allowed weapons as well. I was wondering what similar rates are in Canada, but
my search skills failed me.

~~~
masonic

      other countries, where kids are not legally allowed weapons as well
    

Kids are not "legally allowed weapons" in the US, either.

~~~
dariusj18
That is not entirely true, as with most gun laws it is per state, and most
states have no restriction on child ownership or possession of guns.

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sneak
> _Some 6,464 deaths involved children between 5 to 14 years of age, amounting
> to 340 deaths annually on average. A further 32,478 children between 15 to
> 18 years old died, or 2,050 per year on average between 1999 and 2017._

> _Of these children, 61 percent were killed in an assault involving a
> firearm, while 32 percent died by suicide. A further 5 percent died in an
> accident. The death was undetermined in 2 percent of cases._

It seems misleading to me to include suicide counts in a headline that says
“shot dead”.

Removing suicides, this comes out to 1625 per year. Approximately 900,000
people in total die in the US per year.

What they are describing as an epidemic is in reality 340 deaths per year of
under-14s.

For reference, approximately 450 people per year die of acetaminophen
(tylenol) poisoning in the US.

~~~
phil248
If you shoot yourself and die, you were not shot? I am pretty sure the hole in
your head would argue otherwise.

~~~
CompanionCuuube
Is intentional carbon monoxide poisoning from car exhaust a "vehicular death"?

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colechristensen
These are statistics quoted to support an unstated but easily assumed
conclusion instead of a search for truth.

Very few people actually care about finding optimums and cause and effect
relationships. Publishing compelling results or results that support
emotionally derived positions isn't helpful.

~~~
RickJWagner
I agree. To me it looks like an appeal to emotions.

I think I've seen too many of these. My brain starts to say "Are they trying
to manipulate me?"

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loxs
So the majority of the “children” in this study are 17 year old gang members?

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h3ckr
The society we live in. Damn it, we just can’t agree on such no-brainers

~~~
colechristensen
If everyone lived in padded rooms in government run asylums we would all be
"safer".

The founders wanted the population to have irrefutable rights to have weapons
of war in order to prevent rule-by-force which was everywhere in their time.
Rule by force is everywhere today too and with current leadership trends it is
not hard to believe that it could be attempted here again.

In the UK they talk about knives in quite similar ways to how we talk about
guns in the US which leads me to think that the problem isn't the tool.

Weapons are power. Power is often used irresponsibly. You can try to eliminate
the power or you can try to eliminate the irresponsibility, but it's not so
complicated to do the former.

Much of the unprecedented world peace comes from the influence and policies of
the US, and much of the stability of the US comes from citizens' power
afforded by its fundamental law.

~~~
spaginal
The existence of weapons in a population also serves as a deterrence and a
check against more criminal activity bleeding out into the general population
as a whole.

A part of the reason you see so much mass shooting activity in gun free areas
is the general likelihood that you won’t encounter someone else with a firearm
immediately. Same reason gang activity tends to concentrate instead of fan
out.

The trend that bothers me in western society is the almost gleeful willingness
to having rights stripped from us that were hard fought for. All for the
illusion of safety and civility. As if simply silencing people or disarming
people makes the original problem go away instead of just hiding it. It’s
unsettling.

~~~
colechristensen
>The existence of weapons in a population also serves as a deterrence and a
check against more criminal activity bleeding out into the general population
as a whole.

You hear this quite a lot. It seems it could be provably true or false, has
anyone tried?

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purple-again
24% of US population is children.

.3% are police officers.

.4% are active duty military.

~~~
perl4ever
Is pointing this out offensive for some reason?

~~~
happytoexplain
It's somewhat demeaning and antagonistic to accuse downvoters of being
offended without some line of reasoning given. My guess is that the
implication of your parent post is that the article is wrong to compare those
numbers. Since there's nothing else in the curt reply, it seems to ignore the
disturbing facts of the matter - a wrongness perhaps greater, in some readers'
opinions, than the clickbaity headline, which is at least defensible in that
it illustrates that child gun deaths have surpassed some arbitrary value, i.e.
the numbers are large and rising (supposedly - I'm comparing the implied
message of the headline to the implied message of your parent post, not
commenting on the actual numbers on child gun deaths).

~~~
perl4ever
"It's somewhat demeaning and antagonistic to accuse downvoters of being
offended without some line of reasoning given."

Nobody accused downvoters of being offended. The comment was addressed to
everybody, and wasn't an accusation.

The issue I had with the headline is that it does not _appear_ to be referring
to "some arbitrary value", yet it is. Which is why it seemed appropriate to
point out what that arbitrary value is.

