The Odds of Dying in America

There were 11,000 homicides using firearms in 2011. This is more deaths in one year than US troops had in Iraq and Afghanistan throughout the duration of the wars. . http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

The obvious solution to the firearm homicide problem is to increase the number of guns in the hands of the public and make sure there are no identity checks on gun purchasers. Meanwhile the answer to the much, much smaller terrorism problem is to increase surveillance to Orwellian and Stasi levels using technologies they could only dream about as well as providing military equipment to police forces in case the jihadists execute a paratrooper invasion of the United States.

Charts like this don’t change behavior, because they don’t take into account the emotional element. People add a “horror factor” to the way they measure risk. So dying of a heart attack has a relatively low “horror factor” in the West, because that’s something we expect and are familiar with. Dying of a terrorist attack, or a nasty unfamiliar disease, has a higher “horror factor.” (Of course, the “horror factor” probably wouldn’t be consistent from culture to culture.) So a chart that reflected the real way we really think and feel about the odds of dying would look very different from a simple cold-blooded mathematical accounting. I guess you could call that behavioral statistics. :)

The human brain is just not naturally wired to understand statistics.

The Odds of Dying in America? What an inane question – anyone with HALF a whit of sense knows that it is – yep – hear it – 100%!!!! Sheeesh!!!
Ummm…….as the headline on Zerohedge says – “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for anyone is zero!!!”

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ADMIN: In any given year. Otherwise, its a meaningless question.

Hmmmmmmmmm………

Nowhere on The Economist’s actuarial table above do I spy the word ‘terrorism’.

Which immediately calls into question the $9 Trillion the USA has spent on ‘Homeland Security’ since 11 September, ’01.

Quite a misallocation of wealth, for a country with crumbling infrastructure in which 20% of children depend on food stamps http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/01/28/one-in-five-u-s-children-depends-on-food-stamps/

‘City on a Hill’, indeed.

“There have been no recorded deaths due to a meteorite fall. A dog was, however, reputedly killed by the fall of the Nakhla martian meteorite in Egypt in 1911 and a boy was hit but not seriously injured by the fall of the Mbale meteorite in Uganda in 1992. The chances of witnessing a meteorite fall let alone being hit by one are negligible.”[0]

If you get killed by a meteorite, you probably won’t be the only one, as it’s likely to be a big one.

[0]http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/space/meteorites-dust/meteorite-faq/index.html