Complete agreement. Many people are incapable of thinking in Bayesian terms though and without even a minimal awareness of statistics it leads one to constant ridiculous conclusions. Like, for example, a "professional" in the IT game asserting a random seven digit number will never collide with another during a program run, or, as you mention, things that are vanishingly rare in reality are common just because the media rubs every nose it in every day.

On that note: the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was roughly 1 in 614,000,000. … The chance of a child being shot and killed in a public school is extraordinarily low. Not zero — no risk is. But … it’s far lower than almost any other mortality risk a kid faces, including traveling to and from school, catching a potentially deadly disease while in school or suffering a life-threatening injury playing interscholastic sports. And that from the heavily left listing WaPo. It should also be noted that general violence and crime in US schools is on a multi-decade down trend. Not excusing it of course. Just showing that among those incapable of Bayesian thinking, news directors lead the pack and not always naïvely. Fear sells and to bring it back around to being on topic, fear as the basis for decision making leads to bad decisions, almost inexorably.

Yes school shootings are part of a media hysteria.

Unfortunately the effects of lousy education are not.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

Media hysteria

«The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

perl -MCrypt::CBC -E 'say Crypt::CBC->new(-key=>'kgb',-cipher=>"Blowfish")->decrypt_hex($ENV{KARL});'Help