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.