Center For Shark Control

The most callous part of me woke with this thought: New school year, time for those back-to-school shootings. Perhaps this was fueled by that meme of a photo of the gun sale at Wal-Mart. Of course that doesn't mean that gun violence took a holiday in June and July. Caps were popped into folks all through the summer. Chicago had a particularly rough time of it.
Which is important, but it is not the thing that makes me cringe the way that phrase "school shooting" does. All of those minds coming up with solutions like metal detectors and arming teachers are trying to imagine ways to solve a problem without fully understanding the problem. Last spring, Congress voted down funding for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to study gun violence. If you had already concluded that the National Rifle Association had something to do with that vote, please feel free to take a hollow point round out of the prize bin for being so clever. If you figured this was a recent event, sorry, you'll have to give back your souvenir. It was back in 1996 that the CDC was prevented from studying gun violence as a public health issue. In the past twenty-two years, more than six hundred thousand Americans have been shot.
And yes, there are probably a vast number of people who have been stabbed during that span.
Or run over.
Or electrocuted.
Or attacked by sharks.
Eighty-eight shark attack fatalities in 2017. Worldwide.  It is interesting to note that the United States leads the way with fifty-three of those deaths. More than half. Somebody was studying this. Keeping track. There is no shark lobby interfering with the research being done on how to keep humans safe from sharks. Because sharks are dangerous. I would suspect that bringing a hungry shark to a school would be something that would be discouraged, after some research. Or maybe we can just agree that having a hungry shark anywhere near a school is a bad idea.
How about loaded guns? I guess we'll have to wait for the report to be released.