A Grim Education

Has anyone watched this?

No, but I will when I get the chance.

Very powerful video.

So much to unpack here.

First, while I think most survivors must have a difficult time with each subsequent school attack, Columbine survivors may have it worse because theirs is invariably mentioned (with accompanying video) on news reports. Not only do they have to relive it emotionally, but here is the television and the Internet replaying all of those horrible images again from that day.

Second, it's interesting to me that, at least in this particular video, the older victims seem to bear more emotional scars from their experiences than the younger ones. I'd be curious to know whether or not that was true across the board.

Third, I hadn't really considered that in addition to recovering from the wounds, both physical and emotional, that survivors may have the added burden of then feeling like they had to be something or do something significant in the world because of the "second chance" they were given. And how this might weigh on them and make recovery even more difficult if they are unable to live up to that.

Fourth, it's sad to think that the 900 hundred members of the survivors of mass shootings Facebook group is but a small fraction of the total number of victims now in this country.

Finally, the lists of all the school shootings by year is truly sobering when you just see them scrolling by for minutes on end.

I don't like this video because it gives the idea that school shootings are common, when they aren't. School shootings just get disproportionate media attention, so it "feels" like its happening all the time.

When in reality, mass shootings in general make up less than 1% of homicides, and your chance of dying in one is less than 1 in 1 million/yr

And on school shootings in particular:

Quote :

a classroom is just about the safest place a kid can be in America. I realize that’s a difficult thing to accept after an event as traumatic as Parkland. According to a New York Times review of statistics from the Gun Violence Archive, 43 people were killed on school campuses in 2017, 25 were killed in 2016, and 33 in 2015. That includes both victims of mass shootings and conventional homicides (my somewhat-awkward term for homicides other than those from mass shootings). That’s out of about 55 million students attending K-12 schools, public and private. The odds of a given child getting killed in a mass school shooting — or any school shooting — are literally less than 1 in 1 million. The criminologist James Alan Fox points out that since 1990, there have been 22 shootings at schools in which two or more people were shot, or well less than one incident per year. That’s less than one incident per year out of 100,000 public schools and >33,000 private schools. This means that the average elementary, middle, or high school can expect to see a mass shooting about once every 150,000 years.

"Washington Post, Radley Balko, 'Putting Cops in Schools Won't Make Schools Safer'(2018)"