You're turning it into a moral issue instead of a measurable one...
Loggers, oil and gas workers, roofers, police, and more, all have SIGNIFICANTLY higher chances of dying then the average person.
They do their job everyday.
The idea of 'significant' is subjective. Statistically, anything that is not random is significant.
You need points of comparison.
Significant in comparison to what?
Do the night shift workers have higher chances than these groups and therefore should people be overly concerned?
Is it about equal?
I'm asking for accuracy instead of outrage from the news media so people can decide for themselves because statistics is easily massagable for the less knowledgable to create maximum outrage.
The tech skills that I think are critical to a software dev:
Git and version control, learn them as in depth as you have time for. Every decent dev environment has these and the amount of people lacking this basic knowledge is staggering.
Bash/Linux or powershell/windows same thing. You can get an amazing amount of things done with shell scripting in your OS. Unless you have an insane amount of time I would pick one and learn in depth. These are rich systems.
A dynamic programming language in depth. There are so many concepts that will transfer between languages that if you know one in depth, you'll be able to pick another one up pretty fast as it's just semantics at that point.
SQL, this is an essential part of dev life and you will understand ORMs and data management better.
The personal skills:
Communication obviously. This is such a vague term and I think is abused as people just say 'lERn to CoMmUNicate' with no actionable advice. Things like politeness, small talk, respect for other's etc.
At the same time know when to be honest. I've seen the best communicators tell management exactly what management wants to hear over and over and projects kept being behind or over budget because there was a dysfunctional connection between the manager and the engineer who kept B.S.ing them with what they wanted to hear and the nitwit manager eating it up and for some reason never learning.
Systems reasoning, learn to understand the system from the line of code up through the stacks to the whole. Sounds cliche and it is but it will make you a better programmer.
Debugging. This will be most of your life. The more you understand the system, the better you are at it.
Managing upwards. Keep your manager happy and communicate your work to them.
Looking at this logically, 8chan is available all over the world.
Yet only America has these shooting happening regularly.
Could it not be 8chan but America that has the issues?
I have a feeling 8chan and Video Games and guns are not the issue here but structural social problems with America.