Counterpoint...there were more than 53,000 stabbings in the UK in the same period. I couldn't even find the same stat for the US. When someone wants to be violent, pretty much any heavy or sharp object will do, making things illegal doesn't really change the total amount of violence. You do get less homicides, but more people with life changing injuries. If it wasn't for the UK locking thousands of people up for Facebook memes, this would probably be a convincing argument. Ironic considering Starmer is a human rights lawyer by trade.
From the statistics I've seen, the US has a higher stabbing homicides per capita than the UK.
Even then, I'd much rather a family member be stabbed and survive than be shot and killed. You're way more likely to survive a stabbing attack than a gunshot. Gunshots are consistently more lethal than stabbings. And you're extremely less likely to die as a bystander to a stabbing than as a bystander to a shooting.
How many school mass stabbings happen in the UK annually? How many school shootings happen in the US every month? We've had around 30 school shootings in the US so far in 2025, and we've only just started the fall semester!
We've had around 30 gun discharges within 4 blocks of a school so far in 2025. That's how they measure what a school shooting is. By the definition of a school shooting you would expect, the real number is low single digits. One of them was the same day Kirk was shot, just one state over.
Fun fact, school shootings currently are about 1/10th of what they were in the 90s when I was in school.
Look, I don't really care about this issue. It just annoys me that people lie with stats about it. Its the kind of behavior that degrades people's faith in experts, journalism and institutions.
I made a point to use the number of shootings resulting in injury or fatality. So no, you're wrong.
There have been over 90 instances of reported discharges around school grounds so far in 2025. Around 30 resulted in injury or fatality. Which, remember, we're still have a good bit of school for 2025 left.
I don't know where you're getting the 90s comparison from. Everywhere I look the statistics show it's worse now than it was then. There was a leak around '92 but it leveled off for a while.
Even then, it's an extremely weak argument to me. You might as well be arguing "we've had lead in the gasoline for decades". It happened in the past as well, so why change it. Maybe we should do something to address the issue instead of just continuing to accept it.
Did those shooting involve someone associated with the school in some way? Because if not, your stats are still ascribing one problem to a completely different problem with different policy solutions. Schools are often on the cheapest land in the area. Where do you think most gun discharges happen? That's right, on or near the cheapest land. That's why counting shootings near the schools yields shockingly high numbers.
But if you want to institute good policy that reduces these numbers, mischaracterizing those incidents is a bad way to do it. And on this issue, the track record of those gathering the data is terrible. I'm not pulling these tactics from nowhere, these are all things that specific surveys have done to manipulate the data. And if you do that, you clearly don't care about reducing the number of shootings.
> Did those shooting involve someone associated with the school in some way?
I'm sorry, but why does this matter in the end? We're still talking about students being injured and killed in schools by shootings during school hours. Do you think the parents really care that much in the end if the shooter was affiliated with the school or not? You're needlessly splitting hairs. Nobody should be discharging guns anywhere around schools. No student should be worried about getting shot in school. It's absolutely insane to me you're suggesting "but what if the shooter was unaffiliated?" Absolute insanity.
I do agree, it's frustrating there's dozens of different definitions of "school shooting". It would be nice if there were good, solid, government statistics in this regard. But one party has consistently fought against the government having a standardized method of reporting and studying such incidents. I wonder which party.
You know what though? Most of the developed world doesn't have to worry about the myriad of different definitions, because for all those definitions the yearly average is damn near zero, not 30 or 90 or whatever.
