If you get killed, who will kill you?
Let’s start this off by saying that if you die for some
reason other than old age or illness then statistically you are not going to be
murdered. Overall, if you die of injuries, you are
going to die in a car. It shouldn't come
as a surprise that activities you engage in frequently are more likely to end
up going horribly wrong. Cars are very
dangerous, but we use them every day. We
hurtle along at speeds far in excess of what our bodies can withstand in metal
contraptions weighing thousands of pounds.
We are driving in various states of competence, experience, and impairment
with thousands of other people of varying rates of competence, experience, and
impairment. These heavy metal
contraptions we hurtle along in are stuffed full of explosives, and contain
plenty of flammable material. But
despite the undeniable danger we place ourselves in every time we get in a car
or walk near cars they aren't that scary.
But why aren't cars that scary? Statistically a car is going to kill
you. I would argue that we aren't scared
of cars because we are familiar enough with them that we are able to see that
even though they are dangerous a car probably won’t kill us right now. Because we know that cars are not waiting
outside our doors to kill us we tend to underestimate just how dangerous they
are, but that is just how our minds work.
Familiar daily dangers seem less scary than the dangers that seem to come
out of nowhere.
(This entry is really just a digest of this interesting
chart http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCID_Unintentional_Deaths_2010-a.pdf)
Now, you might think that “OK, cars are going to kill me,
but right after that it has to be crazed gunmen killing indiscriminately.” Nope.
After cars comes unintentional poisoning. If you are between the ages of 25 and 64 you
are actually more likely to die of poisoning than cars! Before age 24 cars are number one, and after age 65
the number one cause of accidental injury death is falling down. “Falling down might kill old people, but what
about me?” You ask. Well, falls are the number three killer.
At this point I think it would behoove us to look at
numbers. The numbers I’m using are not
rates, they are totals from 2010. The
numbers were provided by the CDC. The
numbers do not include illness. They
numbers are for “unintentional injury death,” though I’m not sure what
definition of “unintentional” is being used since suicide and homicide
certainly seem intentional to me. The
number for motor vehicle deaths in 2010 was 33,687, and the numbers for
unintentional poisoning were 33,041.
Considering that we live in a country of 300 million, the difference
there seems pretty negligible. For unintentional
falls the number is 26,009. So here we
see a significant drop of over 9,000 from the previous total. But this number is actually misleading since
21,649 of those falls were by the over 65 crowd. So I guess you could say, that even though
falls are number three, if you are under 65 falls probably aren't that big of a
risk to you.
Onto number four, Suicide with a firearm. 19,392.
(Before we go any further I want to point out that suicide
is divided up by mechanism. Homicide is
as well. This entry will not go fully
into the significance of this, but as we continue on with this series I will
examine mechanism of homicide more in depth.
I think it is important.)
Number five, Homicide with a firearm. 11,078.
We finally get to killing, but you might have noticed that suicide is
almost twice as common as homicide. In
fact the numbers for gun deaths (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf)
are ~60% are suicides and ~35% are homicides.
Of the remainder ~3% are accidents, and a good chunk of what’s left are “legal
interventions.” If you get killed by a
police officer it doesn't count as a homicide, it’s a legal intervention (I
have a whole tangent I’d like to go on here, but I’ll spare you).
Do you know what the next two are? Suicide and Suicide. Suicide by suffocation (if you’re trying to
figure out how people commit suicide with a pillow, try thinking hanging or
jumping off a bridge), at 9,493; and Suicide by Poisoning, at 6,599.
If you want to know what the last three of the top ten
injury deaths are they are:
Unintentional suffocation, 6,165 (3,400 are the over 65’s);
Unintentional unspecified, 5,688 (4,596 are the over 65’s); and Unintentional
drowning, 3,782. Homicide by means other
than guns is not in the top ten for the overall population, though if you look
at the chart you can see that other forms do pop up for certain age groups.
Now you might have noticed something. If you add up the top three methods of
suicide the total is 35,484. That’s
more than cars. That means that you are
more than three times as likely to kill yourself as you are to be killed by an
assailant with a gun. 320% more likely
in fact.
You are more likely to be killed by a car than by any other
mechanism, but cars have no agency. Your
car doesn't want you dead, it’s just a thing.
But the numbers show that there is a killer stalking
you. When we think about dying we often
think about “who” more than “what.” Suicide
is more likely than other forms of injury death. And most accidents are going to be things
that you cause for yourself. Who is
going to kill you? You are.
Statistically speaking anyway.
I absolutely love this entry...and now feel compelled to get a restraining order against myself.
ReplyDelete:D
ReplyDeleteThiis is a great post
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