6d ago

Fun fact rule

ID: stevens_bad_advice posted: "Fun fact, if billionaires got shot as often as school children, we'd run out of billionaires in 2 months."

14 comments

So we either stop shooting children or start shootings billionaires. Which one do you think is more likely?
- Be the change you want to see in the world ¯(ツ)_/¯

As much as I dislike billionaires and think we have a huge problem with school shootings, the math on this doesn't check out. According to Forbes there are more than 2,500 billionaires; 2,500/60 > 40 per day. I didn't dig too deep on the stats for school shootings (because oof), but thankfully we're not there. There are so, so many more than could be, and it's a horrible tragedy that we're doing nothing about, but we aren't there.
- Looks like that page is worldwide billionaires. I thought it obvious that the meme was talking about Americans. A very quick Google search tells me that "there are 756 billionaires living in 43 of the 50 US states or Washington, D.C." (and no billionaires in the last 8 states). That's less than 13 per day.
  
  Let's see if we can't figure this out.
  In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were accidental (549), involved law enforcement (537) or had undetermined circumstances (458).
  The FBI collects data on “active shooter incidents,” which it defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Using the FBI’s definition, 103 people – excluding the shooters – died in such incidents in 2021.
  The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot, even if no one was killed (again excluding the shooters). Using this definition, 706 people died in these incidents in 2021.
  Citation: What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S. | Pew Research Center - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
  None of these numbers really seem to add up to what's in the meme.
  Edit: although, what if we killed one billionaire for every school kid that got shot, whether the child died or not. That might work?
- I didn’t dig too deep on the stats for school shootings (because oof), but thankfully we’re not there.
  The post says "shot" not "killed". I've only done a superficial search, but looks like
  Each day 12 children die from gun violence in America. Another 32 are shot and injured.
  aource
  So the post is only off by what, a week or two?
  E: assuming that the 12 killed are also counted in the 32 shot, otherwise the meme is underestimating it. (E2: which, reading again, is an assumption I shouldn't be making because it clearly says that another 32 are injured, so yeah, we're there)
  
  yeah, the post says shot, not killed. but, it clearly implies that all of those who get shot end up dying because it also says "run out of billionares"
  if they most of them survive we wouldn't even come close to running out of them in 2 months
- So last year we had 60 school shooting deaths (in the us) but we also only have 756 billionaires (in the us). At that rate, it would take 12.6 years.
  In 1794 in France, they averaged 30 a day. It goes a lot quicker with a guillotine.

Let's test it.

When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric... something something good hearts law, idk, be the change you want to see or something.

14 comments