statistically speaking, this was bound to come up at some point. And frankly will likely come up more frequently as time goes on. "If you don't change where you are going, you will get where you are headed.", Yogi Berra, maybe.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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There's a similar and related math problem for this:
How many people do you need in a room before 2 of them share a birthday?
The answer is around 50, which is way less than most people expect.
At 50 people is is 97% likely and at 60 people it is 99% likely.
So not guaranteed, but surprising if nobody shares a birthday.
The math on it really defies most people's intuition
I think the question is usually frames as "how many people does it take to make it at least 50% likely that two people will share a birthday", or more likely than not etc.
A guarantee would need 366 people. But most people are satisfied with "more likely than not", "90% chance", or "99% chance".
EDIT: I meant 367, not 366!
More than 50% is like 20 people.
It would take 367 for a guarantee because of leap years.
If you assume one mass shooting every three days for the last 15 years, and there being 1700 people "present" for each (within earshot, not necessarily immediately in danger), there are now over 3 million people who have now been present for shootings.
We've had several times to re-evaluate how we deal with firearms in this nation, and here we are more than a quarter century after Columbine and nothing has changed.
The genie's out of the bottle now, you can't feasibly take all the guns away anymore. Best you can do is improved gun control for NEW firearm sales, and perhaps buyback programs. But your countrymen will never accept being disarmed forcibly. Plus with all the shit going on, perhaps it's time for more left-leaning people to arm themselves too. Idk, I'm not from around there.
Now the question is what to do next. A sane country would invest in mental health, generally improving people's overall well-being (health, financial, etc), and rooting out all the right-wing propaganda.
The USA is not that country.
Shit, if we could just provide universal health-care like everyone else does, we could remove a huge source of mental health decline, not to mention poverty and homelessness.
A sane country would invest in mental health
Bro just give people a reason to get up in the morning and this won't happen.
The problem is they feel like they have nothing to lose and want to take their anger out on society.
I mean that is also indirectly an investment in mental health, just not directly in mental health services.
But I don't think it's JUST the "nothing left to lose" mentality. If it was, you'd see more rich people being shot. There's a huge factor of the "nothing left to lose" people being indoctrinated into hating other people like themselves instead of the rich.
I guess your schools are adequately preparing children for university.
At my high school, a student brought a gun to school and took his English class hostage. SWAT showed up, the school went on lockdown. Ultimately, he didn't shoot anyone, but he set off fireworks in the classroom, causing SWAT to burst in.