More Americans Are Killed By Stinging Insects Every Year Than Die In Mass Shootings
posted by Winston Smith at
10:30 PM
Wednesday, April 04, 2018
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12 Comments:
An important part of the issue here is preventability, Winston. And what it's uncontroversially the business of the law to concern itself with. Given that mass shootings are easily preventable, don't happen with anything like the same frequency in any other country, are always characterized by unimaginably horrific violence and are always instances of mass murder and nearly always of citizens by citizens... how the number of mass-shooting deaths stacks up against deaths from stinging insects doesn't seem to me to have a great deal to do with how concerned we should be about them and whether we should be doing more to stop them.
This appears to be an example of the Fourth Developmental Stage of Risk Communication: All We Have to Do Is Show Them That They’ve
Accepted Similar Risks in The Past.
https://www.cmu.edu/epp/people/faculty/research/Fischhoff-RAUnplugged-RA.pdf
DJ:
Isn't the point of that comparison to help put the risk into perspective?
Which is a little bit like what Anon just said.
Those who read the article in the second post will learn that risk comparisons often fail to foster good risk communication for well known reasons.
Quiet, Winston, you fool! You’re merely going to cause people to attempt to exterminate my beloved hexapods!
The outrage about this kind of thing just isn't primarily about risk. It's about what happened to these people, not what might happen to me. They're currently protesting in Russia about a fire in a mall that killed 64 people, mostly children (including an entire school class). Apparently it's all about corruption, corner-cutting, negligence, ignoring regulations etc. If you told any of those protesting people that actually, Russians are still more likely to die from snakebites / traffic accidents / alcoholism / spontaneous combustion / whatever, they'd look at you, with justification, as though you were insane.
Also, if we're playing the numbers game, which as I've said I don't think we really should be anyway, when it comes to things like school shootings, the deaths are far from being the whole story. Having to see your schoolmate, up close, get shot in the head with an AR-15, convinced that you're next, makes you, in a highly significant sense, a victim. A lot of pro-gun types seem to be so caught up in the 'Parkland kids are just pawns in a librul gun-confiscation conspiracy' spin that they have actually managed to repress the fact that a lot of those people really are victims. and not in the 'victimology'/'victim Olympics' sense. Exhibit A: Laura Ingraham.
Even just in terms of their own rhetorical strategy, I don't think there's much mileage in Second Amendment enthusiasts trying to soft-pedal the methodical gunning down of children in the US. Some things just aren't soft-pedalable, so the real story starts to become why people are trying to do the impossible.
Jeeeeeedbuuuuuuurgh!!!!!
Heh heh heh
you know you love it
Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Jedburgh?
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