Phobia Indoctrination Part VI: The probability of dying in a school shooting versus the fear of school shootings. (Pass me the hemlock, please.)

 Once upon a time, I had the courage to use a thing called "math," and to use the process I have been describing throughout this series on any and all issues.  That process involves using both numerators and denominators to assess how well calibrated your fears are, and whether or not they are being stoked in a particular manner.  Then, a thing happened.  You may recall what happened to Neil deGrasse Tyson when he did what I recommend.  Neil calculated some probabilities on school shootings, as a clear-headed mathematician would be wont to do, and backlash ensued.  Since he is a public figure, he caved, even though his math was right.  I know exactly why he caved.  I have said nothing about this topic for many years, but silence and cowardice are tiring.  At this point, I return to my Socrates.  Hemlock before bullshit.  My purpose is to debunk.  My purpose is to apply scrutiny to claims that cannot withstand scrutiny, and should those who accuse me of putting high things low and low things high wish to switch my morning coffee with Sanka or something similarly poisonous, I would lack virtue had the threat intimidated me into silence.  Come, Meletos, and be questioned.  Surely like Socrates, I will reveal myself not to be clever.

Are you afraid of mass shootings?  Are you afraid of school shootings?  There are drills that now happen in schools.  Let us begin with language.  From "murder" to "gun violence" to "gun deaths."  Does your memory extend back sufficiently far that you remember how this happened?  Did you notice it happening?  Once upon a time, I watched in consternation as the right performed linguistic manipulation with a kind of douchey but ultimately pointless glee that irritated me and made me wish for some symmetry.  Consider, for example, "Democrat... Party."  Where's the -ic?  The ic is in the assholery.  A focus group consultant named Frank Luntz ran some silly, little focus groups, backed by some larger polls, which showed that respondents had a more negative reaction to the phrase, "Democrat Party," than to the actual, proper name, "Democratic Party," inclusive of its ic.  He told every member of the Republican Party to use the improper name, just to be jerks.  They complied.  There are many such examples.

Once upon a time, I wished for some symmetry.  I like symmetry.  Unfortunately, the left was then taken over by those who believe that language is the only thing that matters.  This happened right around the time we then got to 2016, which was not a good year for politics.  That was the rise of the man I know as "the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie."  Donald Trump.  At the time, crime rates in the US had been following what we call "a secular decline."  What is "a secular decline?'  Secular, in this context, means that there are minor perturbations amid a general downward trend.  That trend had been happening since the 1990s.  Murder rates followed other crime rates.  The country was comparatively safe.  Singapore-safe?  No, but compared to the crack epidemic, as we called it?  Quite.

But recall that Donald Trump is the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie, and his campaign in 2016 included, amongst many other lies, the lie that the country was a crime-ridden, post-apocalyptic hellhole, because the President was Blackie McBlackenstein.  Remember, everything Donald Trump says is a lie.  Everything.

The logic loop/paradox is that the liar then says, "I'm lying," but Donald Trump cannot bring himself to say that, to fuck with our heads.

Anyway, so this was Donald Trump's 2016 lie, leading all the way up through his inauguration speech.  That would be the "American carnage" speech, decried by the left, and anyone tethered to crime rates for its dismissal of the secular decline in crime rates.

(Gee, I sound like a right-wing extremist, don't I?)

Anyway, yes, crime rates, and homicide rates have gone up since then, but that's not the point.

The point was that Trump's lies presented the left with a problem.  You see, they really really really wanted to scare the fuck out of everyone to argue for gun control.

They no longer say "gun control."  They now say, "gun safety reform."  Remember-- language.

However, it is difficult to convince you to be very very very scared of guns, so scared that you need to pass whatever bills they demand that you pass, while simultaneously telling you that everything is fine, everything is safe, and that Donald Trump is lying.  Which he was.

Or rather, it is hard if you care about logical consistency.  I do, they don't.

So what happened?  A shift in language.  From murder and homicide to gun violence, and better yet, gun death.

What happens when we change the language?  A lot, to the inattentive mind.  First, when you remove the name of the crime, and substitute the name of the object, you direct attention away from the criminal and toward a thing to be regulated.  Yes, that was exactly what they were thinking.  Never blame the criminal, criminals can never be blamed.  That is why you see so many on the left who object to the prosecution of criminals, or anything punitive, and an insistence that any discussion of crime be immediately redirected towards "underlying causes."  That way, the criminal bears no responsibility for the crime.  Notice these things.

Then notice what is happening in places like San Francisco where these policies are put into practice.

Notice something else.  Notice the shift from merely gun violence to gun death.  This is not innocuous.  This allows a very dishonest statistical manipulation.  By far, the most common death-by-firearm is a suicide, and after that, there are deaths concentrated in specific neighborhoods.  However, the left wants you to hear, "gun," and think, "school shooting."  But how common are those?

This is where Neil deGrasse Tyson made people mad, where I have made people very, very, very mad, and where I now simply say, gimme the hemlock.  I asked a question, and if my question reveals the emptiness of your position, that will not stop me from asking you.  What if your high thing is low, Meletos?

But before we get there, I return to the linguistic observation.  A suicide is very different from a school shooting, but by shifting to the phrase, "gun death," the left inflates the number.  It gives you a much larger number of "gun deaths," and then says, look at this school shooting-- but not the Nashville school shooting, we don't want to talk about that one-- see how many "gun deaths" there are, be afraid!

At the same time, and this is perhaps a minor point, I've gone down a School of Social Work curriculum rabbit hole.  "The algorithm" introduced me to a youtube channel run by Leslie Elliott called "The Radical Center."  Fascinating.  She was basically kicked out of the therapy program at Antioch for questioning the critical theory/social justice dogma that had replaced therapy.  Instead, what they teach is a guy named Derald Wing Sue, and his followers.  The treatment modalities are 180 degrees opposite from approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy, and it's batshit.  If you actually care about suicide prevention, maybe fix this shit.  The more I read about the curriculum, Wing Sue, and what is going on in those programs, the more concerned I get.  If Elliott and the faculty, ex-faculty and critics around her are right (that's the Haidt side of things), they're making everything worse.

Another day.

Regardless, this is the kind of numerical inflation that I have addressed before.  In Part IV, I noted that transgender people are murdered at a lower rate than the general population, but the Human Rights Campaign wants to paint a picture of hate crimes occurring at such a high rate that transgender people have to live in constant fear.  So, they list literally every transgender person killed, regardless of motive, and hope that no one uses the denominator to notice that transgender people are statistically safer than the general population rather than more at risk, even including the very rare hate crime.  That inflation of the numbers-- including unrelated cases-- is a similar technique here.  The left wants you to be very afraid that someone will murder you or your child with a gun, but the likelihood of either is quite low unless you live in a neighborhood in which that is disproportionately likely, so they pull a linguistic sleight of hand by using something called "gun death," to add in suicide.  While trying to push the therapy programs away from treatment modalities that might actually reduce the risks of suicide, like CBT.

That is dishonest.  It is as though I want to know the risk that someone will murder me with poison.  Hemlock, say.

And you try to scare the ever-living fuck out of me by inflating the numbers, because murder-by-poison is rare.  So instead, you tell me about "deaths by consumption or swallowing of harmful or toxic substances."  That way, you include every drug overdose, and frat-bro who drank too much during pledge week.  Hell, if you really want to push the definitions, you'll throw in all of the infant/toddler choking deaths.

That is not what I wanted to know.  You used a linguistic trick to inflate the number by adding phenomena that are much more common, but not really what concern me.  Same thing.

And if you are not aware of this process, you will be tricked.

The Buchler-Gekko rule applies.  The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that math, for lack of a better word, is good.  Math is right.  Math works.  Math clarifies, cuts through.

The left wants you to freak the absolute fuck out over the probability that a child will die in a school shooting.

What is that probability?  We need numerators, and denominators.  Both are available.  Let's calculate.  Hi, Neil deGrasse Tyson!  You did right.  Why?  Because you are a scientist.  You were excoriated for it, and you caved because you are a public figure.  I am the former, but not the latter.

Where'd I put that hemlock?

Ah.  Right here.  We're ready to calculate.

Hemlock before bullshit.

2023 is still ongoing because time works that way.  In 2022, what did the data say?  50 school shootings, and from those shootings, you can follow the link for 100 injuries and 40 fatalities.  The Education Week story with those data, followed from the USA Today link then describes the increase over time in the total number of shootings.  These, however are raw numbers.

If you want to calculate probabilities, you need numerators and denominators.  Of those 40 fatalities, 32 were children.

What was the probability of a child dying in a school shooting in 2022?  We have a numerator, and now we need a denominator, which would be the total number of children in school in 2022.  49.5 million were enrolled in public school in Fall of 2021, so if we use that as a denominator (close enough to 2022), we are actually underestimating the denominator, and hence overestimating the probability of death by school shooting because shootings can happen in private schools as well as public, but whatever.  This will make my point.

32/49500000=6.46^10-7

That is a low probability.  It is a probability so low that if it were divorced from politics or news stories, and I just told you that the probability of an adverse event were 6.46^10-7, you would not worry about it at all.  If you went to the doctor and the doctor said that there is a probability of 6.46^10-7 that you have some horrific disease, and a probability of (1 - 6.46^10-7) that you are fine, you would leave the doctor's office without a care in the world.  And remember that I have overestimated the probability because I used an underestimate of the denominator.

And we are not done because the point is to beat the fear to death with facts, because anyone freaking out about this needs to calm down.

Thus, we need some baselines, to demonstrate what 32 would mean.  What are the top causes of mortality?  CDC's numbers are here.

Of course, leading causes of death vary by age, and CDC actually does break out the leading causes by age group.  You want the link for leading causes of mortality among children, right?  Here you go.  You can also just use this to check my work, because I will go through the numbers for you.

CDC does not merely give you 0-18 as one age group because there is variation across that range.  The leading cause, for every category across that age group is... accident.  Even with COVID, nothing came close to accidents.  How big was the difference?  For 2018-21 (across four years, so break that down) there were 1299 deaths by accident in just the 1-4 age group.  If that breaks down evenly by year, you're still an order of magnitude over school shootings per year, in just the 1-4 age group.  827 in the 5-9 age range in that period of 2018-21.  Another 915 in the 10-14 group.  They don't even go up through 18, and I haven't even mentioned stuff like septicemia.

I didn't even know what septicemia was, but it was in the top 15 causes of childhood mortality, and when you look at the numbers-- 79 across those three age groups for 2018-21-- you are in the ballpark for school shootings.  Remember, the data don't cover 15-18, so we have missing data.  79/4 is about 20 per year.  Add in a few for the 15-18 bracket, and that's the school shooting death toll from 2022 from a term I had never heard before, and yes, it was what I would have bet if I needed to bet, but I had never heard the word, and you're lying if you say you have.

So let's spend a moment on some numbers far larger.  Like childhood heart disease.  

Yes, childhood heart disease.  You think of heart disease as a disease of the elderly, but have you ever looked at how many children die of it?

Take a look at the numbers.  116 from the 1-4 age group alone in 2018-21.  116/4=39.  More toddlers died of heart disease per year than kids died of school shootings in 2022.  We haven't said anything about the 66 from the 5-9 age range, or the 132 from the 10-14 age range.

Yes, childhood heart disease is more likely to kill children than school shooters.

And it's not close.

And there's more, if you look through those figures, like "septicemia."  And more beyond that.

Do you have a child?  How much time do you spend freaking the fuck out about septicemia?

If you are going to say something about medical regulations, that's not what I asked.

I asked, how freaked out are you about the likelihood of your child dying of septicemia?  Or childhood heart disease?  Or something else more likely to kill a child than a school shooting?

If you are on the left, you want to jump ahead to something like the following, "yes, but I can stop all of the school shootings by __!"

I did not ask that.  I asked how afraid you are.  If you overestimate the probability of the adverse event, to the point that you freak yourself the fuck out, you will not make a rational policy decision, and you cannot even begin to have the policy discussion.  The first step must be, what is the probability of the adverse event?  If your assessment is not calibrated, everything else will go wrong.

The question for today, and each post in this series, is about the assessment of the probability of an adverse event, and what happens when someone makes a conscious effort to bias your perception of the probability, to get you as freaked out as possible, taking strategic advantage of your inability to calculate a probability the way I did above.

32/49500000=6.46^10-7

Basic arithmetic.  Not arrhythmia, just arithmetic.

If you cannot make an accurate assessment of the probability of the adverse event you are trying to prevent, or whose risk you are trying to mitigate, you are not going to make a rational decision.  Instead, there may be a group that tells you, be very afraid because it's scary out there!

Remember that phobia indoctrination is not merely the political use of fear.  It is the tactic of instilling or exaggerating fear so that those so motivated will trust you and only you, staying cloistered within a cult-like group if not an actual, literal cult.  The point is to say, there are bad and scary people out there, so you need to stay with us, where you are safe.  Central to that process is a clear dividing line of who is safe and who is dangerous.

Now, picture in your mind's eye the image of "school shooter."  Or, "mass shooter."  Whichever.  If we were a "we," such that there were a you rather than me blathering into the void with nobody reading this, I might ask you to describe what you pictured, but the image is one of common cultural construction.  This is the person of whom you must be afraid.  And this is whom you must picture whenever someone says, "gun."

But did you actually click on those CDC links?  Assault (homicide) actually does crack the top 15, among children.  It doesn't among adults, where cancer, heart disease and the others are the big ones, but among children, assault actually does crack the top 15.

But not school shootings or mass shootings that occur inside schools.

Do you think that your image of "school shooter" matches the data on homicide?

Crime, including homicide, is non-randomly distributed geographically across the country.  There are locations in which your probability of dying by homicide is near zero, and there are locations in which your probability is far higher than other causes of mortality, controlling for your age.  The left asserts, with minimal evidence, that poverty causes crime.  That construction neatly takes all responsibility away from the criminal, which fits with the language issue discussed at the beginning of this post, but it is also ahistorical, and incompatible with evidence from across the globe.  There are poor countries around the world with very low crime rates, and at other points in US history, the much higher rates of poverty that we observed were not associated with similar rates of crime.  Does that mean poverty has nothing to do with crime?  No, it means that simple, reductivist claim that the left uses to absolve criminals of responsibility in the modern, US context is too simplistic and reductivist.  The world is what we call, "complex."  Part of that complexity is that crime is not uniformly distributed across the country.

It is also on an uptick, as you may have read, seen, or hopefully not experienced, but perhaps so, particularly if you happen to live in such a place.

2020 really was a year in which crime started to go up again.  Why?  COVID would seem to be an easy explanation, except that the crime increase wasn't a global phenomenon, and the crime rates have continued on their path even as the pandemic faded.  The answer that the left really does not want to hear is that it may have something to do with decreased policing.  Devi & Fryer argue that you can trace a distressingly large number of homicides to reduced policing which results from the investigations of police forces after "viral" videos, but not investigations that begin otherwise.  Why?  Police pull back.  There are several other pieces investigating the so-called "Ferguson Effect," wherein reduced policing is the response to protests, and crime follows.  We can observe more directly the consequences of defund and similar ideological movements in places like San Francisco.  All of these processes accelerated, beginning in 2020.  Is this what caused the spike in crime?

The data are far from conclusive on that point, in my assessment.  Time series analysis is the thorniest part of econometrics and this will take a long time to sort out.  Yet homicides are going up, and you can see the results in causes of mortality among children.

If you are focused on school shootings, you will not see the effect.

32/49500000=6.46^10-7

However, telling those who watch MSNBC to think about the image of a school shooter is far more politically convenient than asking them to wonder whether or not reduced policing is actually leading to higher homicide rates, detectible in the data when we look at childhood mortality.  The image of the school shooter is, to the MSNBC viewer, a political other.  He represents the totality of evil of that other, and why the other is so bad and evil and scary and why you need to freak the fuck out about your kids and red America and those people and everything wrong with those people and what is wrong with those people, you can't even talk to those people, run, hide, they're scary!

But crime?  Part of the game is to not even say the word, "crime."  Depending on where you live, you may be quite safe from crime.  How, then, can you be turned into a quivering mass of terror, hiding under your sheets with a probability of 32/49500000=6.46^10-7?

Hide the denominator.  Always hide the denominator.  This trick always goes the same way.  Hide the denominator.  Ideally, don't even really talk about the numerator.  Instead, rely on the power of what I keep calling "the paradox of news."  A story is news because it is different.  It is a deviation from the ordinary, or it wouldn't be news, yet when you see a news story, you conclude because you see it that it is ordinary.  That conclusion is exactly wrong.  That is what I call the paradox of news.

Funny, but I have been explaining this paradox to students for decades, in my terminology, and every once in a while, a student realizes independently what this means for school shootings.  I love when that happens.  I love watching the gears turn in a student's head.  They freak out a little bit as they realize they've been lied to, but it is awesome to watch the lights come on.

I suppose I am corrupting the youth, which means I deserve my hemlock.  Unless you, Meletos, would like to submit to some questioning.  I have some questions for you, my dear Meletos!  For I am not wise, and I am not clever!  I do not know why crime goes up, nor why crime goes down.  I do have some questions, and perhaps you already know the answers, Meletos, for you are cleverer than I.  Few of these questions are more complicated than simple arithmetic, and with Menon and others, I have done little but ask questions of the youth, and would you say that you are less able to answer my questions than these young minds?

Come, my dear Meletos!  I have questions.  Also, while I take my coffee black, no sugar, I like a slice of lemon with my hemlock.

Music.  The hardest thing about being a self-righteous, holier-than-thou hipster who looks down at everyone else's taste in music is that every once in a while, someone really good becomes very famous.  This one works perfectly for today, and it was on my mind with the reference I made a few days ago to an SNL sketch.  The Police, "Murder By Numbers."