PSA: Things As Scary As Guns

PSA:
In light of recent events in the media, I've decided to run down a short list of things that should scare you (if you're a statistically average US citizen) as much as civilians with guns. I'm not espousing any particular agenda with respect to guns-- I just wanted to calibrate my sense of damage done by guns against other causes of death, so I went and looked up some numbers. All numbers that follow are US figures, not world figures (sorry rest-of-world!).

First, let's get a baseline. A number of sources, including the CDC (where I've gotten most of the data for this post) peg the annual number of deaths from gun homicide at about 10,000. Deaths from mass shooting are a negligible contributor to this total, even with fairly liberal definitions (one of the standard definitions is an incident in which 4 or more people are injured or killed by a gunman).

So, what should frighten you as much as other people with guns?

1) Yourself with a gun. Technically, this should, statistically speaking, scare you twice as much as other people with a gun. Close to 20,000 people die annually by suicide with gun. I wanted to start with this one to prime you to be a little suspect of the statistics I'm going to present. Just because you should be scared of something "statistically" doesn't mean you should actually be scared of it. (For a numerically-better comparison, 10,062 people died from suicide by suffocation in 2013.)

2) Coal plants. Estimated premature deaths from coal usage are around 10,000/year. Most of these deaths are from respiratory disease exacerbated by particulates and other stuff produced by coal plants. This, by the way, is about 1/20th the per-kilowatt-hour rate of death caused by coal in China and most of the rest of the world, largely thanks to the Clean Air Act. This is also HUNDREDS OF TIMES more deadly per kilowatt hour than nuclear power, even including incidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Also, it produces comparable amounts of radioactive waste. Basically, coal is worse than nuclear in every respect except price -- nuclear power costs about twice as much, on average. (Also, for the record, oil is about twice as deadly as coal, natural gas is about 1/4 as deadly as coal, and wind and solar are both much safer than those but still not as safe as nuclear because of worker accidents.)

3) "Malignant neoplasm of the stomach". CDC's wording here. In 2013, 11,261 Americans died from malignant neoplasms of the stomach. So, if you stay up at night worrying about gunmen, you should stay up slightly more worrying about stomach cancer.

4) "Certain other intestinal infections". Yeah, ok, cancer's bad, but it turns out that all of the intestinal infections that don't get their own category add up to being just about as deadly as stomach cancer. Yech.

5) "Congenital malformations, deformations, and chromosomal abnormalities". How many people do you know who died from congenital malformations? How many do you know who died from gunshots? Those numbers are probably pretty close. Again, a reminder that nobody is the statistical average.

6) Flu. Sort of. The annual death rate by flu varies pretty wildly due to differences in strains and differences in the length of flu season. I decided to take the geometric mean of the minimum and maximum numbers of deaths in one flu season (usually a good way to find a rough estimate when you only have the minimum and maximum possible values of a quantity), which comes out to about 12,000.

I hope this helps!