Acceptable Risk

Ask yourself honestly: If politicians had come to you on December 13, 2012 (the day before the Sandy Hook shooting) and said "we want armed guards and/or teachers with guns in your elementary school," would you have thought that was a good idea?

On September 10, 2001, what would you have said if airport security wanted to confiscate your fingernail clippers?

Acceptable risk refers to things that we allow with the understanding that there is a chance it could go wrong, either because the chance of negative results is too low or because the positive results negate the bad.

Look no further than the number of accidental deaths in the US, and acceptable risk rears its head. According to the CDC in 2012 (http://io9.com/5919434/prescription-painkillers-now-the-leading-cause-of-accidental-deaths) the number one cause is now pain killing drugs. Not far behind: automobile accidents. Staying withing prescribed limits of painkillers almost completely eliminates the risk, making it acceptable.

Unfortunately, staying within the legal limits for speed and behavior in a vehicle doesn't offer nearly as high of a survival rate. The actions of other drivers affect you. Considering this is the second highest cause of accidental death in the US, where is the outcry? Well, we all understand that the benefit of our highway and road system makes it almost a necessity, despite the risk. There is some risk, but because of the benefit, it is acceptable.

Enter firearms. How much risk are you in of being killed by a firearm? What benefits do they provide? Do these benefits outweigh the risks? This one walks the line quite a bit more than things like painkillers and cars. But let's look at some numbers. I've taken these from gunpolicy.org.

In 2011, there were a total of 32,163 deaths due to firearms, including homicide, suicide, and accidents. Of those, 11,101 were homicides. 19,766 were suicides. 851 were accidents. The remainder were undetermined causes. There were roughly 311 million Americans in 2011. This means you had roughly a 0.01% chance of dying in a firearm related incident. Assuming you aren't suicidal, and you don't subject yourself to the kinds of situations where accidental shootings are a possibility, your odds drop to 0.003%. That means you have to live for 33 thousand years before you are statistically assured of being fatally shot by someone.

For that same year, there were roughly the same number of deaths due to automobile accidents (32,367) as total firearm deaths. Drop it to just homicides, and you are roughly three times more likely to die in a car accident than by being shot maliciously.

But the numbers don't tell the whole story.

The car crash victims are much more diverse than the homicide victims. Car crash victims might have a slightly higher risk based on where they drive, when the drive, and their driving habits, but it becomes far more polarized with homicide victims. Looking at crime maps, you'll see a geographical concentration of homicides in the areas you would have guessed. Low income, high gang and drug activity, the usual suspects. Read the descriptions of the homicides, and more suspicions are confirmed. If you were killed in a homicide, odds are you knew you were at risk of it, and your decisions put you in that place. So, even in the high homicide areas, you can remove a good deal of risk by avoiding those activities.

And then there are the outliers. The Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook victims. I don't mean to marginalize these incidents, but the reality is that the risk of something like this is astronomically low. They get the most media attention because of their dramatic nature. They spark the most debates because of the same. But what is the risk?

If you combine all of the mass shootings from 2011, you get 19 fatalities. Granted, 2011 was a good year, in that there were very few of these incidents. 2012, however, was a bad year for mass shootings: there were 72 fatalities. It's the worst year in decades according to my source for these numbers, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data.

72 fatalities. Think about that. There are 311 million people in the US. More people than that died because of... almost any other cause of death than that. The risk of such a thing is almost completely negligible from a statistical standpoint. That's 0.00002% chance of fatality due to mass shootings in the worst year since 1982. Break that down to one person, and from a statistical standpoint, you'd have to live for roughly 5 MILLION YEARS before dying in a mass shooting.

The risk of most people being shot, let alone killed, by guns is already well below the risk we take every day getting behind the wheel. I'm already quite comfortable with these odds, regardless of who has what kind of guns. If you aren't, then start walking to work, and don't fall.

Why I stopped watching the news

For those of you who don't know me, or don't know me very well, I lost friends and co-workers in the accident in Buffalo, NY in 2009. Until that event, I typically watched the news, as I felt it was almost somewhat necessary in order to know what was going on in the world. I still feel it's somewhat necessary to know what's going on in the world, mind you, but watching TV news is about the worst possible way to do it.

Why did that accident change my mind? Because it highlighted with little question what the news was, and still is: Entertainment. They are private companies, motivated by profit, who make their income off of advertising. What do advertisers want? Viewers. What to viewers want? To be interested, entertained, stimulated. They don't necessarily want to be educated. So, the news is actually quite effective at doing what it intends to do. The problem is that their intention is not to educate or inform. They claim it is, as it's part of their image. But that's not what people want. Look no further than the viewer numbers on PBS, the NASA channel, or any other dead or dying education network (we miss you, History Channel. Please come back to your original self. Pawn Stars is not history.) You'll see that truly educational, objective, rational TV dies. It's just not exciting enough to hold the viewers' short attention spans.

How did that accident highlight this? Ask anyone who had a story on the news about themselves, something they did, or something they know a lot about, and you'll get the same answer. The news is a master of skimming the exciting, controversial, sensational bits off of reality, and ignoring the rest. To add to that, they are absolutely obsessed with being the first among their competitors to do this. They brag about this in their commercials. They spew misinformation, lies, hearsay, and other worthless babble out as quickly as they possibly can, just to beat their competitors to it. So that they can stake some claim as the most effective news gatherers out there, because while their slow poke competitors were tripping over themselves trying to find their keys, they were professionals. On top of it. The first on the scene. It doesn't really matter what they are saying, so long as they say it first.

They are more obsessed with being fast than being right. Why? Because people tire quickly of a story. By the time the full details are out, it could be months later. It could even be years later. Any thorough investigation takes time. The more complex the issue, the longer it's going to take to sort it out. By the time the truth, or even the whole story is out, public attention has shifted to some other hot topic, and everyone clamors over each other to be the first ones on that scene. The mess the news left at that other scene is left to rot. It may not ever be mentioned again unless necessary to save their reputation. Only when someone publicly points out the fact that they spewed misinformation, lies, or exaggerations will they retract, correct, or apologize for it. If no one calls them on it, off they go.

I don't blame the news for this. They are just giving people what they want. The problem is that the people have generally forgotten how to research things for themselves. It's just so much easier to listen to some talking head on TV tell you what's going on than it is to look it up, research it from all angles, and decide for yourself. Plus, if you actually do take the time to research it, you'll typically find that you don't really care that much about that thing anyway, and stop researching. And this brings me to my next point:

You don't need to know most of this shit. Why does a kidnapping five states away need to be your problem? Sure, I could see the media spreading something like “look out for this kid, last seen with this guy, in this car,” in the hopes of getting the kid back home. But if they did that objectively, they'd have to spend a great deal of time covering every kidnapped child out there, or at least in whatever geographical area they have decided to care about. That's a lot more time than they want to spend on it, and that's a lot more missing people notices than viewers want to watch. So what do they do? They report only what the hot story is, as they have to keep up with their competitors. And, we're back to the core issue of what news really is.

Watch the news, even the local news, and give it this test: What, out of all these stories, do I actually need to know? Someone got shot across town? Nope. A teacher at some school your kids don't go to got caught selling drugs? Nope. Take it to the national level, and it gets even less important and relevant to your daily life. If it was important or relevant, I'm betting that you would hear about it through a channel other than the news.

The accident in Buffalo spurred a national media discussion about pilots, airlines, training, regulations, blah blah blah. All things with which I am intimately familiar. The watered down, misinformed talking heads on the news seemed like they couldn't even accidentally get anything right, at least not completely. It might be partly right. It might be exaggerated. Most importantly, they completely ignored parts of the story that weren't interesting. As any good entertainer should. If it's not interesting, cut it. By the time the accident investigation was done (over a year later), the issue had fizzled, and received little more than a passing mention on the news. Just when the truth was out there to be reported, they didn't care to report it any more. It wasn't the hot item it was a year before. They're on to other things. It opened my eyes. If they are so wrong and/or incomplete about this, why should I think they are right and complete about anything else? I shouldn't. And I haven't since.