Which murders matter?

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Mass and celebrity shootings become even more tragic when authorities and commentators exploit them to inflame vicious campaigns targeting powerless groups.

Should policy makers value only those lives and dangers the public is most concerned about and focus attention and policies on addressing those concerns?

That might seem understandable at first glance. The public is infinitely more upset at school shootings, mass shootings, and hate killings by disturbed/diabolical murderers, especially when the victim is a well-known celebrity like Charlie Kirk.

Media reporters, agencies, and political leaders prioritize assuaging an inflamed public. President Barack Obama ordered flags flown at half mast to mourn the 20 children and 6 adults murdered in 2012’s horrendous Sandy Hook school shooting. President Trump ordered flags lowered to eulogize assassinated right-wing luminary Kirk. Although Obama’s action was less crassly political, the motives of both presidents are understandable. Large swaths of the public upset at the killings demanded action.

But there’s a sinister side to the obsessive media and authoritative fixation on rare mass and celebrity killings: they invite malice while suppressing discussion of mammoth, real, and uncomfortable dangers, especially to American children and youth. Spectacular and emotional tragedies are exploited by unscrupulous leaders to drive unreasoning, bigoted policies like harshly policing feared groups and banning youths from social media.

That exploitation is a grotesque misuse of the responsibility of experts, policy makers, and conscientious media to provide the context and perspective that foster effective measures – which is why America never seems to solve its grossly outsized problems.

My interests are real dangers and policy

Sensational crimes are very hard to prevent precisely because of their rarity and wide range of motivations. Policy becomes distractive and destructive when it exploits rare tragedies to manufacture generalized claims vilifying entire outgroups and punishments designed to satisfy fearful popular clamor to “do something!” (just not anything that bothers anyone important).

If we’re interested in formulating effective policy to prevent violence, then the scientific index is not rare events, but real and common dangers, especially those unpopular to talk about.

For one difficult example, if the Sandy Hook and Kirk shootings occurred in a typical American week, they accompanied 20 children and teenagers murdered by grownups in domestic violence, 350 Americans (including 30 kids) murdered by guns, all part of the 450 Americans (including 45 kids) murdered overall that same week.

We should just keep the flag at half mast

The harsh reality is that we ignore the day-to-day tragedies because they don’t threaten “us” (until they do), and/or because psychologically, they’re an endemic crisis too big to face.

But we ignore them at our peril in policy discussion. For another difficult example, consider how what seems like an encouraging reality is so devastating to media and political needs it is simply suppressed.

Here’s another un-faceable truth: amid the grim headlines, schools remain among America’s safest places from gun violence, with levels on par with Berlin.

In the worst year, 2023, in the 143,000 primary, secondary, trade, and higher-education schools in the United States, there were 350 incidents in which “a gun (was) fired, brandished, or a bullet hit school property”. That is, a child or teen would have to attend school daily for 400 years to risk any kind of gun incident and 1,700 years to risk being killed by gunfire at a school.

Europeans and Japanese would not find even that level acceptable for their schools, but in the American context, it’s a stellar achievement. If the rest of American society were as safe as the schools and colleges attended by 70 million people daily, the United States would have 90% fewer gun deaths and injuries.

But all sides, far left to far right, have whipped up such a frenzy demonizing schools as bullet-riddled hells that the utterly crazed right-wing cure-all for school shootings is gaining traction in terrified district after district: arming school personnel and officers to patrol hallways.

If leaders succumb to popular fear and anger by arming more adults at school, we will have more school shootings, more dead kids, and more dead grownups – a fact that has already unfolded. Locales with more guns (i.e., Republican counties compared to Democratic ones, Texas compared to New York, etc., cold Centers for Disease Control numbers show) suffer vastly higher rates of gun killings than locales with fewer guns.

Those who advocate arming school personnel – and those who inflame fears leading to drastic anti-remedies – should be honest: “Let’s satisfy our egos by making relatively safe schools as dangerous from gunfire as the rest of American society.”

That’s just one reason that from the endangerment and policy contexts I address in this substack, we should prioritize real, common, everyday dangers, not what upsets the public the most.

There are more reasons. The next substack will deal with the historical trends those left to middle to right ignore and distort in dangerously appalling ways to keep their emotional bigotries afloat.