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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.




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