What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on
177 comments
·October 14, 2025HarHarVeryFunny
Well, yeah.
TV stations are out to make money, not to inform society. All their programming, news included, is designed to attract eyeballs, hence money, and sadly sensationalist and titillating stories is what most people want to see.
mmanfrin
And the only institution with a mandate to educate and inform just got defunded.
subless
It's like my journalism professor told me since he used to be a news anchor ... "If it bleeds, it leads".
j_timberlake
I'm surprised how low suicide rates are at 2%. If I were an old sick person and steadily becoming more of a burden, there's no way in hell I would just leave it to nature to decide when I die, or let the profit-maximizing hospital bureaucracy make that call for me. I'm sure some old folk are afraid that suicide will send them to hell, as if God wouldn't understand.
aeternum
Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age into account. It's not really noteworthy that old people die of heart disease and cancer.
I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss. For example if a 12yo gets murdered society considers it a much more significant loss than a 90yo having a heart attack.
Similarly your level of safety in a city is more a function of the rate of random crime vs. the often cited city's overall murder rate. This difference explains why some cities that feel safe actually have a high homicide rate and vice-versa. In some cities crime is unpredictable whereas in others it is more confined to areas where visitors rarely travel.
andrewmutz
> Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age into account. It's not really noteworthy that old people die of heart disease and cancer.
I think this is the whole point of the article. The news does not cover reality as it is, it selects information that is noteworthy and drives clicks/views/engagement/ad revenue.
This is why the news has been shown to increasingly misrepresent reality:
monero-xmr
It also has to do with “deserving” death, or injustice. Someone who is obese dies of a chronic illness, or a smoker, etc. doesn’t register as news, or even the cause themselves, because the vast majority of obese people and smokers know themselves that their lifestyles lead to illness and early death.
But dying from a criminal act? It’s undeserved and arguably more easily preventable than grand lifestyle changes across the whole population. If a felon with 50+ arrests murders someone, a “quick” adjustment in laws could prevent it in the future
atonse
I wonder gang related violence gets more coverage only if it results in innocent victims. Deserved vs undeserved. Probably does.
themafia
> Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age into account
Age is not evenly distributed across the population. You could just break this down into age brackets and show a chart for each bracket.
> I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss.
The original data does have adjusted statistics similar to this:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db521.pdf
> Similarly your level of safety in a city is more a function of the rate of random crime vs. the often cited city's overall murder rate.
Accidental death is the #3 cause of death. Your level of safety is primarily down to your own actions. Ladders are the most dangerous piece of equipment commonly owned. Murder and random crime are a minor fraction of this category. Suicide is twice as common as murder.
> crime is unpredictable
Types of crime maybe. Location of crime? Almost completely predictable.
thfuran
>Age is not evenly distributed across the population
But luckily, unlike wealth inequality, age inequality is decreasing. Fewer people have little of it and more people have more of it than ever before in this country.
hombre_fatal
On the other hand, you're most likely to die of heart disease, yet the interventions needed push heart disease well into old age should start as young as possible.
So if you wanted to improve your diet and lifestyle, it makes more sense to first pull the major levers that avoid or postpone your most likely killers before you, say, worry about food dyes.
Yet not even our new HHS seems to understand that.
giantg2
You could also just cap it 49 or 54 years old. A lot of medical research does this when looking into things like cancers. It gives a pretty good indication of whats going on during early and prime year without as much longevity bias or 'old age/natural causes' deaths skewing the data. If you make it fully age weighted then you might adjust away things like murder for the 35+ crowd, or overinflate things like SIDS, drowning, and childhood cancers.
tidbits
City Nerd made a good video on how crime statistics often incorrectly compare to a cities overall safety: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m4jG1i7jHSM
jowea
I believe homicide rate is frequently cited simply because it's the only crime rate that is remotely reliable. Other crimes get underreported but it's hard for the police to ignore a body with a gunshot wound.
Although it would be an interesting chart. But the distinction between what is noteworthy/newsworthy and what actually kills is precisely the point of investigating this topic.
AstroBen
In terms of younger people, a really surprising thing I learnt the other day: "for Americans age 18-45, the leading cause of death is fentanyl overdose"
Odd this article doesn't even mention it.. well actually apparently its "4x over-reported"
ekianjo
It's not about age. It's about deviations from expectations. No newspaper is going to write "grey elephant crosses street" but you can be sure they will report "pink elephant crosses street" because it's unusual.
jedberg
Way back in the 90s, I had a hacked satellite dish. This meant that I could get local channels from across the USA. My roommate used this for a school assignment. He looked at how much time local news spent on each topic, categorized by city. Here is what he found:
- All newscasts featured crime more than anything else ("if it bleeds it leads").
- All newscasts had a local feel-good story.
- All newscasts had weather (although East Coast and Midwest stations spent more time on it).
- All newscasts had a local sports update
But what was most interesting was what they spend the rest of their time on:
- In New York, it was mostly financial news.
- In Los Angeles it was mostly entertainment news.
- In San Francisco it was mostly tech related news
- In Chicago it was often manufacturing related.
That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
nemomarx
Those last ones reflect the dominant employment sector in each city, right? That seems like what you'd want to see given a lot of viewers will be involved in that kind of news or want updates on it?
jedberg
Not exactly. It's the dominant outlier. Entertainment is not the largest sector in LA, but it's the most unique. Finance isn't the largest sector in NYC, but again the most unique.
Tech in SF may actually be the biggest sector, since tech is so big and prevalent, but it certainly wasn't in the 90s.
rtpg
> That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
I feel like the right lesson to take from this is that all data sources are coming from a certain perspective and motives, and so you can choose what you want to care about.
Perhaps you don't care about any of that, which is a fine and normal choice. But "this source is biased so I won't consume it" leads, really, to consuming nothing (EDIT: if you go too deep down this route). I think that consuming varying grains of salt is helpful in the general case.
("This source is biased in a specific way that makes me disregard this person's credibility on topics I care about" is a subtly different argument that is valid of course)
rubyfan
>That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
I dropped off social media for similar reasons. I didn’t want the outrage of others and hype algorithms dictating what I’d spend time thinking about or reacting to. I wanted to be in control more.
vict7
I was fortunate enough to grow up without cable television. Any clip I see from Fox/CNN is usually a bunch of inauthentic, ignorant talking heads that I wouldn’t even trust to tell me the weather.
I’m curious at how many Millennials and younger actually watch the news with any consistency. My sense is it’s mostly older folks that still get their info from TV.
rootusrootus
We have ample evidence that getting your news from the talking heads on cable news tends to lead to a really warped view of the world. But I'm not at all sure that getting it from TikTok will end up better.
khannn
[dead]
whimsicalism
the issue is that this is what people want to watch and so it is even worse for algo feeds.
if you “manage”/editorialize your algorithm to remove these, you’ll be outcompeted in audience share by someone who doesn’t.
mc32
Yes, it's filtered, but to a substantial degree it's because that's what the audience wants. If they make money on ads and that revenue depends on eyeball time, then they will want to maximize eyeball time. An exception would be a news org that was funded differently. However that bias while different, would still be present because you only have so many hours in a day and thus can only present things of interest.
estearum
What someone “wants” is a complicated question.
People “want” all sorts of conflicting and even mutually exclusive things.
It would be just as true to say people “want” in-depth, factual understanding of things that are relevant to their lives.
The real optimization function is what you say later on: eyeball time.
Eyeball time, as anyone with a social media account can tell you, is hardly related to what a person comprehensively wants though.
mc32
Yes, people have ideas of what they would do, read and listen to in ideal form. That's what they tell themselves they would want. Reality or practice tells us what they idealize isn't realized by those people. They actually seek something different --often what they are presented in the news, in food, etc. Sometimes there are things that shift behavior (like physician tells them they need to change dietary customs or their psychologist suggests getting out of an echo chamber)
Braxton1980
So news reports on crime, positive stories, weather, sports, and the dominant industry in the local area.
>is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
As opposed to what? They report on what they think the people that are watching or could watch want to hear about.
This is the same as any business that sells what customers will buy.
Cherry picking is when you select examples that are not representative of the whole to win an argument.
How is the news doing this?
mk_chan
This is very important to write on. A lot of people believe news is worth consuming for the truth and often cite it as a primary source of information. News producers may not necessarily lie but they cherry pick to maximize reach and that content plays on peoples belief that what they see on the news is all the information you need.
The news in a vacuum can actually be quite misleading and I too believe people should realize that it is not the ‘whole’ truth.
whycome
It’s kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some sort of ultimate truth. I’ve noticed a couple incidents recently where the news just literally had the facts wrong and the Wikipedia article for the related topic ended up in this weird limbo until the news stories were updated despite more relevant sources being available.
patates
Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story. It's usually the "which truths get picked and which not" part that gets tricky. Wikipedia makes its own compilation, so citing facts out of newspapers doesn't sound too bad.
csours
More concretely, a newspaper (or other media) will use facts like "Police Media Officer Jones stated that ....". It is factually correct that Officer Jones stated "....". Whether Media Officer Jones' statement is correct and comprehensive, that is another matter.
Feel free to substitute "Officer Jones" for any other occupation.
A very large fraction of news comes from media relations people at the organizations being reported on. Good news agencies will get context from another organization.
Great news agencies will sometimes do the kind of digging that makes leaders of large organizations uncomfortable. The costs in time, money, and reputation (even when you get it right) mean that even the very best news agencies can only report a small fraction of stories in depth.
cogman10
This is the important part of a media diet.
You can get a false sense of how common, dangerous, etc something is by the frequency of reports from a news outlet. What they are saying is true, but how relevant that is to the average person can be far from the truth.
A perfect example of this. I've seen here on HN people worried about crime on public transit (any crime, from murder to petty theft). Specifically citing the terrible crime problems of NY and CA transit. Yet when you actually look at the numbers, you see the crimes per day are closer to 1 or 2 while the travelers per day are in the millions. Meaning it's a literal 1 in a million event that you'll be the target of crime on public transit.
News outlets lie to you not by telling false stories but rather by weaving false narratives around the stories. "Crime is out of control" is the false narrative, but it's backed by real stories of crime, sometimes horrific.
BeetleB
> Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story.
For an important issue that is covered ad nauseum, sure.
For an issue that was hot today but not next week, I hard disagree. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585287
One simple example: The FBI raided my friend's workplace. All the news reported the business as having shut down permanently. Yet my friend worked there for at least 4 years! He said they shut down for a few days max.
For smaller stories, talk to people involved, and you'll get an idea of how inaccurate they can be.
lazide
I think you and I have had wildly different experiences.
If I know something about what is in the paper, it’s rare that the paper is correct. It’s almost always missing some critical piece of information, or wildly misrepresenting the situation to attempt to simplify it to the point your average person will read the article.
willdr
Recent Wikipedia articles are kind of an oxymoron; Wikipedia by design is meant to be a tertiary source, downstream of both news media but also mainstream scholarship. The problem is that it's "an encyclopaedia anyone can edit" — and that inherently means a rush to create or update articles when news outlets publish something novel.
While news media is an acceptable source, proper peer-reviewed journals and other scientific publications are preferred. People would do well to remember Wikipedia is NOTNEWS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...).
jowea
I find the source collating of Wikipedia helpful for recent events. That's when you're going to get most editor interest to improve the page and readers to consume it.
Yeah basing articles on scholarly books is good, but not every topic will be covered and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AThe_deadline_is_no...
johannes1234321
Wikipedia isn't aiming for an objective truth. That barely exists, but a common understanding. See this essay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_cannot...
tchalla
Wikipedias aim is to collect information not tell us the truth. It’s a mirror not a light. News articles are a source of information because they can be verified. For every claim where news articles have gotten wrong, there are 100x times “relevant sources” getting it wrong.
hunterpayne
I'm not sure that the media lately has been 100x times more accurate than a Ouija board, but I'm going to ignore that for now.
The point here isn't that the media is accurate or not. The point is they focus on the attention grabbing events not the important ones. There are basic metrics about the world which completely invalidate many political beliefs of both parties. Those are rarely if ever reported.
For example: - only 7% of the US economy is involved in international trade - renewables have a .1 (10%) capacity factor which means anytime they are used for baseload, they will never pay back the carbon produced in their manufacturing - Mississippi's per capita GDP is about the same as Germany's
Facts like these are rarely reported because they show how irrelevant most of what is reported truly is. That's the point.
Spooky23
My father in law was a fixture in the city newspaper coverage for many years. The facts are usually reliable or refined as a story develops. The narrative is not -- as the people talking to reporters always have an axe to grind, be it ego, resentment, moral outrage, revenge, etc. Bigger stories are usually better if there's some baseline.
For example, a government story that can be baselined by an audit, report or some proceeding is usually more reliable than a scoop.
BeetleB
This has been a problem since Wikipedia's existence. I've had the (mis)fortune of personally knowing people who were charged with serious crimes - serious enough to garner nationwide attention.
The stuff that got printed in the news was at times just plain false. Stuff that anyone in our town could easily confirm to be false. A reporter would hear something wrong, or interview one person who misspoke, and (s)he would never fact check. Eventually those inaccuracies would end up not just in Wikipedia, but in books written by experts on the case in hand.
Even recently, my company has been in the news a lot (negative news). You'll get stories where anonymous employees are telling journalists things about changes in the company. A lot of it is flat out wrong.
Braxton1980
What should they do instead? Any source can wrong.
If you cite a news article a person should be able to use that to locate additional sources.
stuffn
> It’s kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some sort of ultimate truth.
Wikipedia is arguably worse than the sloppiest news slop the media machine can manufacture. It's lawless, it's been shown majority of articles are written and edited by a single cabal of people, and it's also been shown a distinct bias towards one side of the political aisle.
I wouldn't trust Wikipedia any more than anything Rupert Murdoch owns. Perhaps slightly less, because at least in theory Murdoch can be held accountable for fake news and Wikipedia is powered entirely by fake news and accountable to literally no one.
wat10000
News is, by definition, unusual. If you consume it to learn about unusual events then it can be alright. If you use it to build a picture about common events, you're going to end up with a completely upside down picture.
My general guideline is: the higher up the news hierarchy (local, metro, regional, national, international) a personal risk is, the less you should worry about it. Car crashes barely make the local news most of the time, they're worth some attention and care. Airliner crashes make massive headlines, not worth worrying about. The news is very informative here, you just have to understand what it's really saying.
amiga386
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
> The phrase man bites dog is a shortened version of an aphorism in journalism that describes how an unusual, infrequent event (such as a man biting a dog) is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence with similar consequences (such as a dog biting a man.)
daft_pink
I think this would be more useful if compared early death statistics to news reporting.
Everyone dies and everyone knows that everyone dies. I’m not really interested in how I’m going to die of old age, but what I have to worry about today to avoid an early death.
I think there’s probably still a difference in media reporting and probability but i’m guessing younger people 20-30 are most likely to die from vehicle accidents, accidents, suicide and drugs? I’m not sure though and I don’t have any evidence.
rybosworld
I get what you're saying but on the flipside, heart disease is primarily not age-related. Something like 80%-90% of cases are preventable through lifestyle choices. And it's the number one cause of death.
Cancer at #2 is more age-related. But that too is fairly preventable. Roughly 50% of cancers are thought to be related to poor lifestyle choices.
Point being - these are major causes of early death.
daft_pink
1. Death isn’t preventable. We will all die, so if you prevent one cause of death in old age, you will just die of another cause of death. Sure it might extend your life a little bit, but I feel it’s entirely rational to seek out information on causes of immediate death as more relevant than causes of long term death. The probability of living much older than 100 is virtually nil. Probably good to have information on both though.
2. It’s possible they are major causes of early death, but I can’t figure that out from the article and it would be nice if the article provided that information.
slg
Although we should remember that “old age” is long. Someone can die at 72 from heart disease and people might just call that dying of old age when that person could have easily lived another decade or two if they made different lifestyle choices. That would be more of an “early death” than a centenarian dying in a car accident. The suddenness is irrelevant.
BeetleB
> We will all die, so if you prevent one cause of death in old age, you will just die of another cause of death.
I can tell you're quite young :-)
Old age is pretty broad, and you really need to start worrying at some point in your 40s. Although death due to these is rare at that age, you'll likely end up knowing 1-3 people who will die of these at that age. And a lot more in the 50s.
There's a huge difference between dying in your 60s (perhaps right before retirement), and dying in your 80s. Lumping all of these people into "old age" is likely a byproduct of the same biases that cause journalism to not report on it.
lazide
Would you rather die by heart attack, cancer, or misadventure?
Chances are, one of the three is going to happen. The longer you live, the more the first two are likely.
Death by misadventure is possible at any point however!
tptacek
Fatal heart disease is in fact primarily age related.
cogman10
Age and health feed into a ton of the top killers.
Diet and exercise reduces the risks of a lot of health related deaths.
It really is simple math for most people. Reduce your calories, limit your salt, and eat more vegetables.
ajross
> heart disease is primarily not age-related
Uh... it absolutely is? Not sure what you're trying to say here. All progressive diseases, including heart disease (cancer too) are going to be "age related" simply because they take time to develop.
And plaque-related heart disease, the big killer, takes a long time to develop. The statistics are really clear here. People under 30 simply don't die of congestive heart failure absent one of a handful of very rare disorders. It starts to show up in middle age and really takes off after 70.
They are preventable, sure. They are "early" deaths in that the sufferer would die before something else got them. But they absolutely skew toward the elderly. Heavily.
bad_haircut72
I wonder what has a bigger impact on longevity, lifestyle choices or being a multi-millionaire with access to the best healthcare.
Maxatar
Just doing a quick check on this, lifestyle choices slightly edges out net worth.
Living what is called a "low-risk" lifestyle (don't drink, don't smoke, maintain healthy weight, avoid junk food) results in an average life expectancy of 90 (93 for women, 87 for men), compared to being in the top 1% which results in a life expectancy of 87 (86 for men, 88 for women).
The overall average life expectancy in the U.S. is 78 (76 for men, 81 for women).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4866586/
https://www.abom.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Impact-of-He...
nradov
Lifestyle choices have a far larger impact on average. The big gains in lifespan (and healthspan) come from delaying the onset of chronic disease rather than treating it after it occurs.
Jtsummers
Despite their wishes, most people won't become millionaires. The part you can control is your own lifestyle. For the average person, this means your lifestyle will have more impact on your longevity than wishful thinking about one day being a multi-millionaire who can hire doctors to fix the problems you created by being sedentary, eating poorly, and overindulging on alcohol or other substances.
viccis
Wonder which is more realistic, address the horribly unhealthy eating patterns that are drilled into US citizens as soon as they start eating school lunches (if not before), or make all of us multi-millionaires with access to the best healthcare.
recursive
You should also weight those with how practically attainable they are.
HardCodedBias
Being a "multi-millionaire with access to the best healthcare" in the US means that you sit in the same queues as everyone else.
The best you can do is concierge care, but that only expedites primary care everything in the US is about specialists.
kulahan
Avoiding an early death is a lifelong commitment to health. Knowing what the greatest dangers are helps direct your actions in support of that.
some_random
What's an early death though? A 98 year old dying of prostate cancer probably isn't, and a 19 year old dying of heart failure probably is, but what about a 55 year old lifetime smoker dying of lung cancer? If a terminally ill 80 year old chooses to end their own life, is that an early death?
bell-cot
There's quite a bit available about that. Search for "Years of Life Lost" or "Years of Potential Life Lost". Or for a quick start - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost
Theodores
Most lives can be summarised with a birth certificate and a death certificate. For most people, everything that happens between birth and death is not newsworthy by any stretch of the imagination. I count myself in this demographic and this does not mean I live a totally dull and boring life!
You could spend your whole life as the pillar of the community with time for everyone and without an enemy in the world, to live a whole 100 years. Along the way you might have made hundreds of friends and given so much to the world. However, you aren't going to make the news.
Meanwhile, a five year old that gets to meet an nasty brutal end could be in the paper for weeks, with the whole town turning out for the funeral and the whole nation taking note. The five year old would not have lived long enough to 'achieve' anything beyond potty training, yet many words could be written about them.
This is just how the world works. The thing is though, there has been much progress in recent decades on what works for longevity. It is not complicated, you just have to eat mostly plants, get about mostly with your own feet, say hello to people, stay away from the toxic chemicals and keep the old grey cells busy. Accident and communicable disease permitting, you should be able to live longer than your ancestors ever did, with a better 'healthspan'.
If you look at the adverts that pay for the news, everything is working against you. They want to get you to be car dependent and wasting lots of money on highly processed food that slowly gets you. Even by watching the news, you are spending time that could be spent in the company of actual human beings.
If the news was to report on what people do die from, as in the non-communicable diseases that go with car dependency and a high-fat diet devoid of fibre, then they would not be 'advertiser friendly'.
thelastgallon
The article misses the most important point. Its not just the numbers, but whats preventable/actionable vs whats not. One of the easiest things (and the #1 cause) that we can work on is automobile accidents: Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of preventable death for people aged 5–22, and the second most common cause for ages 23–67
Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is not actionable. Sure, we can do lifestyle changes, but eventually old people have to die of something and its in one of those buckets anyways.
hashstring
Hm, but to news readers, how actionable are terrorism-related deaths really?
I would say less than heart disease related ones.
To policy makers, well, terrorism is actionable but so is diabetes. And that while diabetes accounts for a far larger number of deaths.
So I think there is real asymmetry if we look at the data from an “actionable” perspective.
jokoon
People believe that we can prevent and pacify terrorism because it comes from a belief system that we disagree with. Diabetes is just caused by the instinct of eating.
Also people don't really "see" diabetes, news don't show picture of sick livers, people don't understand the science of it. Terrorism is easier to represent compared to diabetes.
Also people believe that we can stop being a terrorist. But we can't decide what happens in our liver.
Another big difference is that you can fight terrorism with the military, but not diabetes. So it's less entertaining and less "concerning".
3abiton
Pretty much this, and to add what does not impact our rights. Take freedom of speech for example, self sensoring can lead to a safer albeit "less fulfilling" life, compares to a one where you dissent against the government (saudi arabia, turkey, etc ...)
rufus_foreman
>> Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is not actionable
"Almost half of cancer deaths are preventable" -- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02355-x
600,000 people die of cancer per year, 40,000 people die in automobile accidents. Focusing on 40,000 automobile accidents to the exclusion of focusing on 300,000 preventable cancer deaths does not math.
null
thelastgallon
Dumb Ways to Die, so many dumb ways to die: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw
I wonder why they didn't start with automobile accidents or driving drunk!
exabrial
With heart disease, we've narrowed it down to pretty much:
* get exercise (literally any amount is great)
* don't eat more than you should (avoid being overweight)
I wish we could do the same with Cancer.
California proceeded to elevate the signal-to-noise ratio so high on Cancer however, and it got scooped up in advertising there really is not any really good general advice. Every couple of years theres various trends or crusades for some minority substance that is never scientifically compared to outcomes or risk. Nearly everything could cause cancer, but the nearly everything also wont. Maybe it's just too broad?
nradov
For heart disease, effective prevention in some patients requires medication such as statins. Exercise and diet are a great start but not always sufficient due to genetics.
Cancer is quite broad. Many of the risk factors such as obesity overlap with heart disease but a lot of patients are still going to randomly get hit regardless of whether they were exposed to certain substances.
B-Con
Bruce Schneier said something (multiple times in his books, blog, etc) that really stuck with me as a young adult.
Basically: If something is in the news, it's rare enough that you don't have to worry about it. Once the news stops reporting on it, that's when you worry.
thaw13579
It would be great to have a similar analysis for elementary school-aged children. Many schools are using "crisis simulation" of active shooter events in an effort to prepare for them (and presumably reduce the risk of death). While good natured, I think it's ultimately just needlessly traumatizing children, since school shootings account for <0.1% of deaths. While school shootings are devastating and sadly on the rise, the media greatly exaggerates the risks in people's minds. By the numbers, the biggest mortality risks for children are drowning and automobile injuries while unbuckled, both of which can be trained without inflicting psychological harm.
mothballed
Nobody wants to hear the kids are dead because the moron parents forgot to lock their own pool gate or because they got wasted behind the wheel. They want to hear the evil inanimate objects or drug dealers did it, someone other than the parents.
antonymoose
How are they training your children? For mine, it’s basically just “teacher gives a signal, barricade a door, hide in a strongpoint.”
I can’t say it’s anymore serious or traumatizing than earthquake, fire, or tornado drills I grew up on.
thaw13579
A summary from the Everytown report "The Impact of Active Shooter Drills in Schools"
"Active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers. Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill. "
https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-active-sh...
Spooky23
Risk management is on a scale.
You always try to react to high-probability, high-impact events (traffic accidents at pickup) with rules, controls and people. You may have rules to high-probability, low-impact events (running in the hallway). Low probability, high-impact events are important as well because the stakes are high. Shooter drills and fire drills fall into that category.
As a society, the United States has decided that the value of allowing easy access to firearms is such that risk of marginal people using them to murder children is ok. We've accepted that by default. Depending on how you count, there are several dozen to several hundred school shooting incidents every year.
It would be irresponsible not to have a protocol to protect the lives of children in school, and tbh, the kids accept it as part of life. Those of us who remember a more innocent time are more horrified.
thaw13579
We of course should prepare and have protocols to protect children in these scenarios, but there are better and worse ways to go about it. I essentially believe it's okay to leave young children blissfully ignorant of low probability / high impact harms (there are many that are equally likely to school shootings that we ignore). Lockdown protocols and training seem fine to me, if they are sufficiently abstract, but there is an emerging trend of "crisis simulations" which involve people posing as shooters, simulating gunfire sounds, and staff / students posing as shooting victims, etc. I think adults can handle this kind of realism, but there is evidence for harm in young children.
umvi
Even "29% heart disease" can be misleading since it could be a 3rd or 4th order death. A big chunk of "heart disease" is likely:
Standard American Diet (high carb, high sugar, high corn syrup, high processed) -> high visceral fat deposits -> Type 2 diabetes -> tissue glycation -> heart disease
Beyond the common narrative on this topic, a factor to consider is that people might be more interested in hearing about death causes, which are not considered their own “fault”. These situations are less “fair”. Thus terrorism, homicide and accidents get a big focus.