No, that is not how statistics nor language work.

1 in 15 means that out of all American adults, 1 in 15 have been on the scene of at least one mass shooting.

Its a broad overview, and says nothing about your or any particular person’s chance of then knowing someone who’s been at a mass shooting within a tiny sample size of 15 people.

You are inserting more complex kind of analysis about demographic / locale / social network specificity into a statement that does not actually imply that, at all, and you seemingly don’t understand the concept of sample sizes and statistical significance: You need a very large, unbiased sample set to be able to draw broader conclusions… a sample size of 15 people is not sufficient.

The chance that any random person in a large and varied population knows someone with green eyes is not the same calculation or chance a random person in that same large and varied population will have green eyes.

Go look at the paper and you can find Table 3, which actually looks at the likelihoods, broken down by varying demographic factors.

There was no investigation into ‘how many people do you know who’ve witnessed a mass shooting’.

That was not a question that was asked, the study did not investigate that.

It is 1:30 AM and I am too tired to give your a crash course on statistics, maybe try SkillShare or find a textbook or wiki page or community college course or something.

Further:

A few years ago, I was walking along a side walk near a gaggle of 10+ people, late at night, maybe 100 ish feet from them.

Car screeched in, did a drive by with a krink, an AK pistol, shot a bunch of them.

That was a mass shooting.

Congrats, you presumably know 15 or more people, one of them is now me, I was present at a mass shooting, you now know someone present at a mass shooting, as does everyone reading this comment.

It almost certainly was some kind of gang or drug dealer territory kind of dispute… but yeah, it waa definitionally a mass shooting, but I guess mass shootings only happen if most of the victims are white and not poor, because uh…

Anyway, I did manage to scramble away, have a panic attack, then call 911, ambulances got there in 10 minutes, cops were seemingly already nearbh and blazed past before I even made the 911 call.

… another insane part was that as I was scrambling away, around a block and down a hill, having a panic and/or heart attack…

… there’s a very preppy looking guy walking a little yappy dog, up the hill, with ear buds in.

He pulls one out and asks ‘Was that a car backfiring?’

I respond, gasping for air: ‘NO. GUNSHOTS. DRIVEBY. Get InSIDE!’

… this guy then looks at me in disgust like I just called him a slur, puts his earbud back in, jauntily continues walking up the hill toward a bunch of screaming, injured people.

Sure, ok buddy, I’m the asshole, yep.

-.-

This all occured in an area where a very wealthy neighborhood and a pretty poor one meet.

Guess this asshat didn’t realize the lines separating his neighborhood from… the 'hood… had just been redrawn.

Yeah… still got PTSD from loud bangs.

Though in fairness, a whole lot more of my life has also contributed to that.

No, the title is completely accurate.

7% of living American adults have witnessed a mass shooting at least once in their lifetimes.

Mass shootings are increasingly common, all over the US.

The paper the article is based on defines a mass shooting as 4 or more struck by a bullet, which is roughly a compromise, average of widely used but not perfectly standardized definitions of a mass shooting.

This study was concerned with direct exposure to mass shootings, which were defined as “gun-related crimes where 4 or more people are shot in a public space, such as a school, shopping mall, workplace, or place of worship.” This definition was a compromise between the Congressional Research Service’s definition of a mass public shooting17 and the Gun Violence Archive’s mass shooting definition,2 designed to be inclusive of individuals who were injured and accessible to the public.

Here’s the paper, two links deep from the article.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2831132

Here’s the study, if you bother to click two links deep from this posted article.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2831132

They define a mass shooting as 4+ people struck with a bullet.

2% of people report being injured because being trampled in a stampede or struck from a ricochet or bullet fragment counts as an injury.

Stampede and ‘crowd-squeeze’ / ‘crowd-crush’ injuries are quite common in densely crowded areas where a shooting, or fire, or something incites a general panic and rush to flee, and can cause as much or more deaths and injuries in very dense crowds than the actual immediate danger being fleed from.

…

Maybe actually read the methodology before constructing a strawman version of it and then tearing that down because your personal experience doesn’t match broader data.

Your caricatured criticism of how they obtained the data, how they structured the survey, is completely baseless and innacurate.

You say you’re 54, so by the study’s definition, you are Gen X, and are thus about twice as likely to have never been present for a mass shooting as a Millenial, about three times as likely to have never been present at a mass shooting as Gen Z.

See Table 3.

…

You’re doing the stereotypical boomer thing, making up baseless nonsense critiques and assuming everyone involved is comically incompetent to justify your gut reaction.

The reason surveys are done is because you can’t actually have any idea about broad social patterns when your only actual data point is the anecdote of your single life and its experiences.

What’s actually sad is how confident you are in your own baseless, made up strawman criticisms and personal incredulity.

If you think your criticisms have merit, I look forward to your own academically published paper taking down the specific methodological flaws you seem to think exist in a paper written by 3 PhDs in the fields of Sociology and Criminology, who are well trained in statistics and survey methodology.

Untill then, I’ll be laughing at the horseshit level critique you’ve thus far presented.

Not 100% sure, but the margins on coffee are probably nowhere near as high as on fountain drinks.

My guess would be around an order of magnitide less.

Still considerable, but the margin on soft drinks is absurd.

I think bottled water is the next step down from the absurd margins of fountain soda.

Hi, my name is sp3ctr4l, good to meet you!

A few years back, I was walking along a sidewalk, heading home from a bar, approaching within 100 feet of a group of people.

But, before I got too close, a car came screaming down the road from in front of me, and then slowed way down as it got parallel with the group.

… And then a krink (AK pistol) emerged from a window, magazine emptied, whole lot of blood curdling screaming and possibly some return fire (sounded like a different caliber) as I dove through some hedges for cover.

Thats a mass shooting, I could have been shot, perhaps now maybe you could say you know me.

Yep.

Could feed a lot of homeless or low income people if you take all of that kind of food waste across a whole town or city.

But when non profits pop up to try to do the logistics of that, well now this garbage actually costs more than they can afford.

Petty Tyrants.

People who get off on power; the ability to control and harm and be superior to others is vital to their idea of well-being.

Good luck finding a used one that isn’t barely on its last legs from being poorly OC’d/cooled, or is just an outright brick that burned out in a crypto mining farm and is now being resold by a shell entity of a shell entity of a shell entity on Amazon or Ebay.

Wait until anon figures out that there’s a waaaaay higher markup on soda/pop than on condiments sold for a distinct and seperate cost, and that’s how a lot of franchise restaurants make a large chunk of their profits.

As in, 1,125% percent markup.

As in, if you pay $2 for a soda, it actually cost the fast food place about 0.18 cents.

Not 18 cents, 0.18 cents.

…

Also, why would an employee care about ringing up a 50 cent condiment?

… Anon has clearly never worked fast food.

Absolutely chalk full of petty vindictive tyrant bosses that will prevent a promotion, chew you out, take that 50 cents out of your pay, and if you regularly do that, fire you, and possibly even report you to the police for some kind of petty crime that boils down to ‘stealing from the company’.

Wagies are often pathetic because their bosses are often evil and cruel, and they can’t afford to lose the job.

This is even more of a specific personal anecdote, but here goes:

My brother is a self described tankie.

Used to live with him.

His entire personality could be described as constantly having a nervous breakdown, and barely masking this with a thin veneer of absurd overconfidence and unchallengable moral superiority.

Just a bubbling cauldron of insecurity.

He spent tons of time following the progression of COVID, and was well informed.

He spent months keeping up with all the updates on vaccine types and availability and different kinds of masks, talking about it all the time.

… Then, after about 9 months of constantly being either having or being on the verge of a nervous breakdown… he managed to convince himself that it would be a great idea to fly to an in person work related convention, in Vegas, during the height of a COVID wave.

He did so, came back with COVID, got me sick, and I lost 2 weeks of work from it.

I was paying more than half the rent, and his finances were way more fucked than he let on, and then proceeded to freak out about that.

… He… knew that even if everyone is wearing masks, it doesn’t work as well when you’re in an enclosed area with a lot of people, and that a convention should be avoided at all costs to minimize exposure risk.

We’d talked about these scenarios in the months prior, in detail.

He knew that I had a bunch of comorbidities at the time for having a way worse time with COVID. Overweight, only recently stopped smoking cigarettes, other chronic health problems.

But nope, it was somehow my fault for causing him stress by … assuming I didn’t have vacation/sick time I could use, assuming I wouldn’t be able to pay my share of the rent…

Not his fault for nearly fucking killing me via COVID, when he knew that was a fairly likely result of his own actions.

… And all of that is even more insane in the context of our shared history, which includes 3 instances where I dropped everything, abandoned commitments to other friends or family, spent a lot of my own money… to save him from being homeless and/or save his life from ODing or carrying through with a very credible suicide attempt.

… I got him the job that he went to the convention for… I got him that job a decade earlier when he was homeless, connected him to some of my friends who worked at the same place and convinced them to convince the owner to pity hire him.

He just stayed there and worked his way up the ranks of a small family business.

Sorry, I’m just having a therapy session for myself at this point, but… jesus fuck, I am so glad I am far away from him.

When a tyrant wraps himself in the flag and the Constitution, burn all three.

Now that’s a good one liner.

Go watch a clip from when he went on Joe Rogan and dismally failed at supporting and explaining trans issues.

He is a moron who acts like he has the moral high ground by default, but can’t actually formulate an argument.

He’s a smug, overconfident blowhard.

He actually is the stereotype of the privileged, limousine liberal know it all that conservatives paint many of their critics as.

His heart may be in the right place, but his mind isn’t up to the task.

I used to live in Seattle and while I didn’t work in the medical field… I knew quite a lot of nurses and other, fairly entry level kinds of medical workers.

Most of these people, again, in Seattle, a supposed bastion of lefties… were vaccine skeptics or outright antivax, when COVID happened.

A lot of these people came from the more conservative areas outside Seattle, and then worked in Seattle because it was the only area hiring… but yeah, my anecdotal experience was/is that many medical staff themselves succumbed to vaccine conspiracies, and would freely admit and bitch about masking and vaccines when off the job.

I… I got this funny kinda tree… doesn’t take too well to water.

Grows best with another kind of liquid fertilizer.

Tony musta got a job with JP Morgan or Amazon or some cushy government job:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/3320030/federal-workers-ordered-return-work-no-office-space/

https://www.benefitspro.com/2025/02/20/rto-reality-check-amazons-office-shortage-exposes-return-to-work-hurdles/?slreturn=20250308-20413

Employer: RETURN TO OFFICE!

Employee: … okie dokie… where’s my cubicle?

Employer: Fuck, wait, we actually need office space after we tell everyone to RTO?

Semi-Related:

Kathy Lueders used to be a high up at NASA.

She personally chose to make Starship HLS variant be the thing that delivers Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface.

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/as-artemis-moves-forward-nasa-picks-spacex-to-land-next-americans-on-moon/

She also wildly misrepresented SpaceX’s capabilities and rigged the ‘request for proposal’ process heavily in favor of SpaceX a few years later.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hAEYtaB3R7Y

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NSZlZegPnl4

… And now she works for SpaceX.

https://www.space.com/spacex-hires-nasa-human-spaceflight-chief-kathy-lueders

It’s basically a comedic parody of the kind of regulatory capture process, the incestuous relationship of people jumping between the private and government sides of a public/private partnership… and its all right in the open, actually real.

This kind of shit is the actual deep state, the actual unelected, quid pro quo, ‘subject matter expert’ asshats that cause waste fraud and abuse.

That is fucking amazing.

Please tell me this ‘cybersecurity manager’ was… fired, or drawn and quartered, or something.

https://github.com/mockingbirdnest/Principia

https://github.com/dkavolis/Ferram-Aerospace-Research

https://github.com/KSP-RO/RealismOverhaul/releases

Hardcore KSP players run KSP Realism Overhaul + Principia + FAR/FARC

Takes off the training wheels and makes things much more realistic.

Real solar system, scales and values no longer on easy mode, much more complex and accurate physics calculations for orbital manuevers, much more realistic aerodynamics model.

If you can get an ‘Oberth Kuiper’ manuever to work in all that, a NASA employee might actually take at least momentary notice.

MAGA people are not capable of empathy.

They are a delusional death cult.

Maybe its possible to convince one of the few remaining Trump critical Republicans, but MAGA people are gone.

I no longer talk to my family because of this.

They only understand pain that personally affects them, and even then, they’re quite likely to delusionally invent a new element to their conspiracy theory cluster fuck that consitutes their worldview/religion.

Maybe they’ll wake up when they, personally, are now homeless and the entire economy around them has collapsed… but maybe not.