Let’s face it, these violent killers have gone unchecked far too long. We need to eradicate the cheeseburger and the threat it poses to our way of life.

Don’t believe me? Take a look below the fold.
Of course it sounds silly (or maybe not, depending on who you listen to and what you read), but stay with me for a minute here.

Hat tip to an article by Christopher Null over at Yahoo! News. He was looking at the latest hoopla over the recall of some Dell laptop batteries and did some research to find out how much at risk you are from an exploding laptop. Since he’s already done the research, I decided to see how the likelihood of dying as the result of a terrorist attack is, relatively speaking, compared to the risks Null dug up.

First, let’s define what the numbers mean. Each set of numbers shows the relative proportion of Americans who die from a particular cause every year. So with a rough count of 300,000,000 Americans, that means if 1,000,000 of us falls into a particular category, the odds are 300,000,000 / 1,000,000 or 1 in 300 that any given individual — you, me, Granny, George W. Bush or your two-headed brother-in-law — will be affected.

In the context of deaths due to a particular cause, a higher number means that fewer people died of that cause, a lower number means more deaths. So to oversimplify things, right now, higher is better.

Clear? OK, let’s proceed.

Wikipedia reports that approximately 3,000 people died as a direct result of the attacks on this country on September 11, 2001. No further incidents of mass attack have materialized since then (at least not on domestic soil), so it is probably fair to guess that those 3,000 individuals are the sum total of American lives lost directly due to terrorism in the past five years. That places the incidence of deaths due to terrorism in this country at 1 death per year per 500,000 people over the past five years (300,000,000 / (3,000 / 5)). That’s probably a pretty fair number to work with, since the number of terrorism-related deaths prior to then was negligible.

Now let’s compare that number with some other statistics, most of them from Null’s article (most of which in turn come from the National Safety Council) but a few gleaned from other sources, sorted from most likely to least likely:

  • Death from heart disease: 1 in 400
  • Death from cancer: 1 in 600
  • Suicide: 1 in 9,200
  • Death from car accident: 1 in 18,400
  • Being shot to death: 1 in 24,400
  • Death from drowning: 1 in 88,000
  • Death from choking: 1 in 97,000
  • Death from air (or space) accident: 1 in 392,000
  • Death from lightning strike: 1 in 400,000
  • Death from freezing: 1 in 469,000
  • Death from terrorist attack: 1 in 500,000
  • Death from scalding (overly hot tap water): 1 in 11,100,000
  • Death from fireworks: 1 in 26,440,000

This is not new news. Murray Rothschild, writing in the Washington Post on November 25, 2001, paints this picture:

What are the odds of dying on our next flight or next trip to a shopping mall? There are more than 40,000 malls in this country, and each is open about 75 hours per week. If a person shopped for two hours each week and terrorists were able to destroy one mall per week, the odds of being at the wrong place at the wrong time would be approximately 1.5 million to 1. If terrorists destroyed one mall each month, the odds would climb to one in 6 million. This assumes the total destruction of the entire mall; if that unlikely event didn’t occur, the odds would become even more favorable.

In another hypothetical but horrible scenario, let us assume that each week one commercial aircraft were hijacked and crashed. What are the odds that a person who goes on one trip per month would be in that plane? There are currently about 18,000 commercial flights a day, and if that person’s trip has four flights associated with it, the odds against that person’s being on a crashed plane are about 135,000 to 1. If there were only one hijacked plane per month, the odds would be about 540,000 to 1.

Now let’s put this into a scenario that’s a little more pleasant. According to the Washington State Lottery Winner’s Gallery, nine people have won prizes of $1,000,000 or more playing the state lottery over the past year. The population of the state of Washington is approximately 6 million people. So if you live in Washington state, the odds that you will win a major prize in the lottery — assuming of course that everyone in the state plays the lottery, which is by no means the case — are approximately 1 in 670,000. (If we take the prize figure down to $100,000, the odds get better — one in 130,500. You’re still one and a half times more likely to drown, though.) Those numbers are probably at least in the ballpark for any state that has a lottery.

And people still think they can win the lottery, and they still think terrorism is a major threat.

The point of this diary is not to present a bunch of morbid statistics. It’s to tell you that we are worried as a nation about the wrong things. We should be losing weight and stopping smoking to reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer, yet we as a nation obsess about the fear of being killed by terrorists when we are much more likely to be killed by one of our fellow Americans driving a car at the wrong speed in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Last I checked, though, there weren’t three branches of government and numerous media outlets reminding us to be scared of that extra piece of bacon on our cheeseburger. I wonder if that might have something to do with it.