Refuting the leftist myth of a school shooting epidemic in the United States

I said some time ago, long ago even, or have been saying, that we will lose the right to bear arms. It's only a matter of time. You can disagree all you like, but the current national sentiment regarding "school shootings," will to any discerning/rational person give credence to my assertion.

The current hysteria over school shootings is a testament to the power the media has over the collective minds of the populace. And despite their ostensible claims to hate the "liberal" media, Republican sentiment is also overwhelmingly dictated by such. (To which Republicans themselves are consistently oblivious.) And this is manifest in the ostentatious clamor, even among Republicans, to take measures, up to and even including the implementation of new gun control regulation, to "protect our children" from school shootings.

Stupid people will, as always, suggest I oppose protecting children or some such nonsense. I have no problem with any pragmatic means of thwarting a malicious shooter, anywhere, in any situation. I take issue, rather, with the utterly distorted perception among most of those vociferously demanding "something be done."

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." - William Pitt, November 18, 1783.

Because their visceral appeals are but the manifestation of their facility. In other words, it merely shows how gullible they are, and how much their thoughts and opinions are directed by the media and how little they're grounded in logic. So before proceeding I will provide a bit more context.

One of the ways Marxists have traditionally achieved the establishment of an authoritarian Socialist state is by assiduously fomenting social unrest and anarchy. The principle behind this is, at its core, simple enough. If you can create enough disorder, anarchy, etc., stupid people in their delusion and desperation will literally welcome, and even beg for, tyranny. Because tyrants impose order. Human beings are creatures of habit that crave structure in their lives. And thus order, even under a despot, is preferable to disorder for many. As illustrated previously on the blog Jonathan Smith described this clamor for safety and security at any cost occurring during Shay's Rebellion.

"Our distress was so great that we should have been glad to snatch at anything that looked like a government. Had any person that was able to protect us come and set up his standard, we should all have flocked to it, even if it had been a monarch, and that monarch might have proved a tyrant. So that you see that anarchy leads to tyranny; and better have one tyrant than so many at once."

It is no coincidence that leftists are assiduously instigating social unrest, and through extension the large, crime ridden riots we now regularly see that stem from such. Turns out you don't even have to provoke "actual" (tactile) social unrest, however. There doesn't even have to be a genuine threat to social stability and personal safety, if you can induce the false perception in the minds of the populace that such exists, through a politically weaponized media that hyper-saturates its reporting with coverage of school shootings, inducing the misconception in the average person that it's far more prevalent than it actually is. Again, it conveys the profound power of the media and entertainment industry upon the human mind, that people are consistently exhibiting palpable apprehension and fear, over something that hasn't impacted 99.99999% of them in any tangible way whatsoever, and with an almost statistical certainty never will.

But the left, consummate demagogues, are constantly seeking to evoke emotion in the people. They want feeling instead of thinking, because emotion is the enemy of rationality. This is why they always tell the story of the poor elderly person who can't afford their own medication when pushing Socialist medicine, and conveniently omit the logistics; i.e., who will pay for it. And it would seem, on the gun issue, the left has finally found the right thing to tug on the collective heart strings of a populace it keeps perpetually apprehensive, paroxysmic even, through a complicit media; their kids. The slightest implication of harm to their children, real or imagined, causes rational thought to evaporate. "Had any person that was able to protect (their children) come and set up his standard, (they) should all have flocked to it." This is what we currently see across the country, particularly any time there's a "school" shooting.

Now let's approach the subject rationally, instead of through the prism of emotion or biased, agenda driven media coverage. This is a map of alleged school shootings.

According to it there were around 60 "school shootings" in 2017. It should be understood that 60 school shootings on this website, does not equal 60 dead children, or even an actual shooting victim. Many, and I mean many, of the red dots you see on the map merely represent the discharge of a firearm on, or near school grounds, and things like "attempted suicide." For example (emphasis mine).

"Two men, 18 and 19, entered Pinewood Elementary school on New Year's Eve, and and fired their guns more than 60 times, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage to classrooms and the library. No one was injured."

That's a quotation from the site, for 2017, Marysville, WA. That incident, in which no one was even injured much less killed, is considered a "school shooting" by this website; because leftists naturally want to include anything that consists of a gun and a school in relation to one another, no matter how tangentially, for the purposes of skewing the data against the Second Amendment. No one was killed? No one was injured? Accidental discharge? So what. That's another red dot, making the problem appear worse, to those who never look beyond the map.

I've said it in the past, and I'll say it again. The notion of a gun violence "epidemic," particularly in a school setting in the Untied States, is a 100% media fabricated myth. (Your child is significantly more likely to be killed on the way to school than at school.) And I'll now illustrate this, again, as I have in the past. When I removed incidents of attempted suicide, and incidents in which no one was injured from the tally provided by the website above, I was left with 31 instances in which an actual "shooter" inflicted actual harm on someone at a school in 2017. According to Accuweather "Each year, 51 people are killed and hundreds more are injured by lightning in the United States." The odds of being struck by lighting in any given year are 1 in 1,000,000, and the greatest loss of life to lightning occurs while fishing. And from this I infer, that people literally have a higher chance of being struck by lightning, than being involved in or the victim of a "school shooting."

How many of you are worried about your child being struck by lighting every morning when you wake up? Almost certainly none. And were I to ask why you're not worried about that, the answer to that question would be it's so improbable it's not worth worrying. So why are people in this country more concerned about something that is, on average, 38% less likely to occur than being struck by lightning? I'll tell you why. Because the TV told them they should be. Where is the clamor to save the lives of lightning strike victims? Where is the clamor to make fishing safer? 

People will now respond with fallacies, arguing one can be stopped and the other cannot, but that's simply not true. There are ways to diminish the chances of a fatal lightning strike, in much the same manner one may take steps to diminish the chances of being shot. And in instances of both, when they do occur, there often was little if anything that could be done, within reason, to prevent either. We could ban fishing, swimming, outdoor activities, etc., in efforts to mitigate the risk and loss of life. But no one's proposing that. The loss of life is just a necessary consequence, they'll say, of the freedom to do these things. Again, leftists do not have the same desire to ban fishing if it "saves just one life," because no one's ever deposed a tyrannical government with a fishing pole. Instances of such being done with firearms are numerous however. That's why they so aggressively target the latter and not the former.

The narrative of the above site (with the map) is basically replicated across the gamut of leftist media coverage. CNN for example, which has its own map, as of May 25 states there have been "23 school shootings where someone was hurt or killed. That averages out to more than 1 shooting a week." The NYT reports that "(School shootings) have become so common that most people likely don’t remember them all — and in some cases, maybe you didn’t hear about them in the first place."

I mean, that's awful. Right? These school shootings are occurring so often (more than once a week), and so many people are dying to them, you can't even remember them all and maybe even didn't hear about them in the first place. You know, just like all the people who die to automobile accidents, stroke, or heart disease.

Is our failure to know about or remember every instance of a thing, proof of anything in particular, much less that something is a "problem" per se? How many of you know about and/or can remember how many times it's rained this month three states over from you? How many of you know about and/or remember every terrorist attack that's occurred in the last year? Or is it merely our innate tendency, as human beings, to place far less emphasis and importance upon things that do not affect us personally and far more upon things that do? (Even among school shooting victims, you would no doubt find if questioned, that none of them know about or can remember every other school shooting.) Ultimately, regardless of how many school shootings people know about or can remember, we're talking about something that as of May according to The Washington Post has killed less than half of a tenth of 1% as many people as influenza and pneumonia. But there are absolutely zero articles from those same sources lamenting the frequency of such deaths during the same period, or at all, much less pointing out how they're so numerous no one knows about or can remember them all.

So I say, with no remorse, that I don't really care about school shootings. I don't fret about it or give it much thought at all. I don't really care about the crying relatives of victims on the TV. The media coverage of these things means nothing to me, because it's almost entirely (if not entirely) mindless hysteria, comparable to fretting over the 0.00001% of the population that dies every year to lightning strikes. And people will no doubt respond to that assertion with sanctimonious indignation. "Oh, how can you say that!? How can you be so heartless!? How can you not care!?" You mean just like you heartless bastards don't care, or even think about, the 51 people (on average) that die to lightning strikes every year? How do you like being construed as a monster for not making something so improbable, and indeed statistically negligible, the focus of your life? Where's your outrage over that loss of life? Where's your compassion? It never even crossed your mind til I apprised you of it. But hey, those people don't matter right? Because they weren't shot.

And that's another thing with which I have long taken issue. This hyper-emphasis on shooting fatalities, the egregiously disproportionate coverage such receives, etc., effectively renders the lives of shooting victims more important/valuable than those who die to any other cause. It diminishes the lives and deaths of essentially anyone not shot to death; they're lives don't matter because they had the audacity to die in a manner that doesn't immediately lend itself to advancing a political agenda. There are no journalists crying on the TV over the loss of life to influenza and pneumonia. (Which begs the question. Is there anyone more full of crap than a modern "journalist?")

So, long story short, this "school shooting" hysteria, and yes, I'm calling it hysteria, because that's what it is, is abject proof this is a nation of mindless sheep led by the TV whichever way the Socialist left desires at any given time. You folks are only serving the leftist agenda by elevating those who get shot over others who die to every other cause of death. Shooting victims are not more important for being shot to death, than someone who died of cancer, or a lighting strike, etc. Except, thanks to facile Americans, they are. If you get shot you're memorialized for days, weeks, months even by a throng of sanctimonious frauds, who don't give a fraction of such concern to the victims of anything else, or far greater killers like "abortion."

The notion this society gives a crap about the 10 kids killed in Sante Fe, Texas, or the lives of children in general, when it tolerates the liquidation of 3,000 kids a day in genocide mills, caught on video dismembering them and selling them for parts, is a hypocritical farce of perhaps unparalleled proportions. The loudest voices decrying the loss of children's lives in Sante Fe, are the same ones that would be celebrating their deaths as a victory for "women's rights," had their mothers simply not wanted them.

So, in closing, I'm all for rational solutions to actual crises. But I will have no part of this damnable madness that grips the nation.