Does it matter by science whether school children are shot down or die by their own hand?

When is Biden going to get it that his mantra to follow the science of both the causes and effects of Covid is making a significant difference to parents who lose their children by their own hands due to imposed isolation in the name of Covid, as opposed to losing them by reckless actions of other children who bring a weapon to school to create havoc? To the parents who have lost children permanently to the isolation effect of political decisions made against current science, it is making a difference.

Yes, it is, because losing a child to the random recklessness of other children is tragic, but much more difficult to prevent. Whereas losing a child to isolation could have easily been prevented by making a decision, not by flawed assessment of science, which has been saying for months that school children represent the least measure of either contraction of the virus, or transmission of it to others. What 'science' is Biden following? Teacher's Unions? And what are they afraid of, given the science? Biden and teachers unions' science is spelled p-o-l-i-t-i-c-s. Sound familiar?

Let's note that fauxlaw writes this hours after Biden ordered every state to vaccinate every teacher in the next four weeks.

Let's also note fauxlaw's readiness to fault Biden for politicization of science but alas, finds no fault with the prior president who actually took a sharpie to a national hurricane forecast rather than admit that he misspoke.  By all accounts Trump muffled and suppressed his science advisers during the pandemic.  Trump literally pushed the scientists to one side and recommended medication that had no therapeutic value but did cause some heart problems.  He pushed the wrong drug so hard  that the people with diseases for which hydrochloroquine was effective ran out of medicine due to ineffective, net-harm but nevertheless presidentially approved demand.  Trump followed the science about as well as my goldfish followed Jeopardy.

I think its a little too soon for Trump apologists to start criticizing the new administration on the question of following the science.  Can't we for a moment simply enjoy the relief of having a president who does not consider most of science an active  threat to his personal world view?  

The statistics coming out of the pandemic are still pretty raw but it does look like mortality in the under-18 bracket actually dropped about 10%- perhaps 2600 kids are still alive today who would be dead in a normal year like 2019.  The best single year improvement in US history.  I know that suicides are up generally in 2020 so I'd accept that teen suicide is also up although I don't see good stats out there. I think its true anecdotally that under 18 deaths from COVID were fewer than lives saved from dramatically reduced transmission of other diseases like flu, measles, colds,  etc.

I don't much buy into the "your child's death is worse because it more preventable" argument.  I guess I reject most arguments from quality of pain- what can we know of another's pain?

Nor do I agree that teen suicide is more preventable than school shootings.  School shootings have been practically nil during this pandemic. Obviously, we can't have mass shootings if people don't mass.   While not a particularly sustainable solution, we can't say that we don't know some ways to prevent mass shootings. 

Teen suicide has been around since Icarus but statistics do suggest that kids in houses with guns die by suicide at four times the rate of kids in houses without guns.  We can only hope that teen suicide will improve after lockdown but that's hardly the most effective way to reduce teen suicide.  The most effective way to reduce teen suicide is to keep kids away from guns altogether.

Further, I'd argue that most school shootings are perpetrated by suicidal teens and the shootings themselves a kind of ritualized suicide.  I don't think there's much separation between the causes of either phenomenon.

Your argument was "open the schools, the kids are dying."  Applying the knowledge that the pandemic has decreased child deaths by 10% can we assume that you now support keeping schools closed to prevent more kids dying?  If the answer is no then you're not really arguing from the "least dead kids" position anymore, are you?

The argument that kids in homes with guns haver higher suicide rates points to the lazy control parents have of their guns. Mine are locked in a safe of which my children are aware, but do not have the combination [it's in the electronic file of my living trust at my attorney's office to which they have no access until my death] and my grandchildren do not even know I have the safe, but are aware I have them, but have no access to them. They're satisfied with that explanation, as are my children.

I never said all children are immune to contracting or transmitting covid; just that it is the lowest sub-group of the population with those issues. We do not habitually close the schools for other issues that may be a risk of life to them, such as small pox, polio, or flue, all of which have noted small numbers of deaths among children.