alt Hacker NewsSchool shootings are extremely rare and so I was curious how it could be that large. The nuance is that those pages are not just listing school shootings as commonly understood/feared, but any shooting involving a school in any way.
So for instance from the 2010s [1] page you get teacher shooting principle, biology professor (female no less!) shooting other professors, guy killing himself in a university library after firing off a couple of rounds at nobody, 60+ guy shooting his 60+ year old wife in a parking lot then killing self, and so on.
I think that's a bit dodgy, because there's something like 130k+ schools of all sorts in the US [2], so you have a massive multiplier there. To put that number in contrast, there are fewer than 17k Starbucks in the US. Do the same by basically any metric, positive or negative, and you're going to similarly see a huge number of incidents.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
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to be fair, other countries also have listed as school shootings any event that involved shooting and a school; eg: Australia with a population ~ 15x smaller than the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_Au...
has a total of six (6) incidents this century (since 2000) .. somewhat less than a factor of 15 less than the US for that same 26 year period.
Note that three of the six incidents of the past 26 years involved guns being fired but no one being hit (no grazes, injuries, or deaths).
We can certainly pick apart any given data point.
It doesn't change the overarching sentiment that guns are a subject that attracts considerably larger attention in the USA than in any other 'developed' nation.
Pick any number of metrics - frequency of incidents, size and power of advocacy groups, political debate, ownership levels, media coverage, constitutional significance - and that pattern is clear.
So my [here refined] point remains : there is no (developed nation) where guns are a greater part of public discourse than the USA. Therefore, when we find ourselves questioning "why are some USA citizens quite passionate about the debate?" (especially where their children are concerned), I don't think we need to look too far for the answer.
That is true for both sides of the debate.
All the dodgy things listed in the second paragraph are solid school shootings?
Many school shootings would also be better classified as “shootings at a school”, such as targeted gang violence or arguments between individuals. This doesn’t excuse these events (kids should be safe at school) but most are not the sort of Columbine-style events evoked by the phrase. Conflating the two likely makes it harder to find a solution, as “ban guns” isn’t on the table without an amendment.