A Look At School Shootings, And Whether It Can Be Fixed

There’s a human empathy component that gets lost in political and online rhetoric, unfortunately.

We’re almost to the ten-year anniversary of Sandy Hook. I’ve written deep dives on that particular topic before, so I will spare you some of that. There’s a lot of political and online rhetoric that follows any one of these events, from discussions about “mental health” to “white vs. non-white” to “lone wolf” to “Did the cops get him McDonald’s?” We get caught up in that stuff, and “thoughts and prayers,” and we tend to ignore the bigger issues about what’s going on. Let’s try to do a little of that — looking into the bigger issues — right here, OK?

Let’s start by thinking about Newtown a bit, because it may be the worst one ever (tough quantification)

Let’s start with the obvious. There’s no real way to quantify a school shooting; it’s horror. It doesn’t really matter if it’s 3 people shot, or 20 people shot; we tend to like the bigger numbers because we understand that says more horror, which means it’s…