I didn't make up anything, nor did I claim every American is running around in a panic. I wondered why more Americans were not doing that, because to me, it seems like a pretty alarming situation. Let me tell you why:
The last school shooting in this province was April 28, 1999. Just over a week after Columbine. It was in Taber. One boy was killed, another student wounded. It became the first incident of its kind in Canada since a Brampton shooting 24 years earlier. If you Google 'Alberta school shooting', one of the first articles you see references a robbery at the University of Alberta in 2016, and that incident involved an armoured car guard betraying his colleagues and murdering them to take off with the cash. Not remotely the same thing as a school shooting. Parents in this country do not need to be concerned about this sort of thing happening to their child. They can buy them a normal backpack instead of a bulletproof one. They can buy backpacks with Dora the Explorer and Frozen characters, not translucent plastic. A school shooting in Canada is a statistical anomaly.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/nat...508503771.html
Meanwhile, America has not had fewer than 57 school shootings per year since 2013, with the country hitting triple digits last year with 108. As of April, there were 24, but that number's obviously gone up since. That's unacceptable. Offensive, even. I wondered how anyone could deal with that, because I couldn't. And as it turns out, a lot of people are dealing with it every day.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...their-concern/
82% of parents in households with a median income of <$30,000 are at least "Somewhat worried" about school shootings, with 36% of those parents being very worried. The median individual income in the United States is reported to be $31,099/year. Those households are either one poor person or two really poor people. So that tells you there's an enormous number of lower income families who think this is a big deal. I would guess that a large percentage of those lower income families are black, Hispanic, communities that the president of the United States repeatedly attacks and scapegoats. So it makes sense why they're concerned.
Overall, 63% of American parents are at least somewhat worried about them, with 24% being "Very worried".
64% of $31,000-$75,000 are also a bothered by this, so I really don't understand why you need to get all pedantic when I suggest two people combining to make $60K are probably about as worried about school shootings as the dirt poor folks. Especially after you suggested Calgary's 26 murders in 2014 were equivalent to 7,280 American ones.
Nobody is immune, nobody is safe. It doesn't matter that it probably won't happen to any individual - it's going to happen to someone, and all anyone can do is pray it doesn't happen to them and theirs. Nobody would get on an airplane if 67 of them got hijacked every year. School shootings are an insane thing to be okay with, and it's clear that this occupies a significant chunk of the brain space of a not-insignificant number of American parents. It in incumbent upon the leaders to fix this, to stop it, and to protect their people. That's supposed to be why they're there.
The point about Russian-funded white nationalist talking points was directed as a more general statement about the gun debate, and I apologize if it seemed like I was calling you out for that. That was not the intent.
Here's something else I think would really help: Let people sue the gun manufacturers. This is a country where McDonald's has to pay $640,000 when some fool spills coffee on themselves, and somehow it was only in March of this year that a court ruled the Newtown parents could sue Remington. What the #### is that about?
Stop shielding these companies from litigation. The NRA has been brought to near insolvency in less than two years; these gun companies do not have the bottomless piles of cash the energy companies do. They NEED to move metal, and if they're being hit with billion dollar judgement after billion dollar judgement, that'll help correct things right quick.