Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

I wanted to reprise something I did back in the 90’s. I lived in California at the time. In a short period of time in California, like a year, several children were killed by playing with their parent’s guns. I don’t remember how many but it was no more that 2 to 4. I believe all the cases involved one child accidentally shooting another.  Of course it was a great tragedy. Many people in the goofy state of Cally, including the LA Times and other BS rags, predictably had a completely illogical and asinine reaction.

Their reaction was to introduce a bill to make it a felony whenever a child gained access to an adult's gun and hurt or killed himself or another child, even if it was an accident. In other words, and they specifically intended this, they wanted to send Mom or Dad or both to jail if their child found the family gun and some child was shot with it. Their reasoning was that the owners of the gun had a duty to keep the weapon secured in such a way that a child could not ever access it. The real intent was that just owning the gun was prima fascia evidence of guilt if a child was shot with it.

The editors of the LA Times published an editorial supporting the bill and urging everyone to get behind it. The basic argument, the same one they always use, was to challenge the readers to think of the children. If we save just one child’s life it’s worth it. Who knows that life we save may one day invent the cure for all cancer. Blah Blah, Blather, Blather, Blah. It was, and still is so much bullshit, as you will see.

Anyway, I did a little snooping around on the Center for Disease Control internet site. The internet was in its infancy then, and the CDC site was little more than a list of text files available as ftp downloads; no pictures, no fancy graphics, no charts. Still, they had scads of data on causes of death.  I worked through the data and then fired off a letter to the LA Times. In it I argued that the law they supported was a really bad idea for a number of reasons. One reason was they wanted to criminalize the parents for something the child did. Daddy goes to jail and Mommy is left to raise the child in a fatherless household. The child grows up feeling guilty not only for killing his friend but for making Daddy go away. I suggested there could be no better recipe for disaster for the child, not to mention the parents, and ultimately all the rest of us in society. 

It was easy to conclude that the bills supporters were either stupid or were such rabid anti-gun nuts they were willing to utterly destroy whole families for their cause.

I went further in the letter to basically call the editors a bunch of hypocrites, and that the arguments in favor of the bill were specious and disingenuous. If, I asked, they were really just concerned about children’s lives and safety, and that sending Mom or Dad to jail was the best way to prevent kids deaths by guns, then we had better start building a lot more jails. I trotted out statistics on children’s accidental deaths, ones that were preventable in most cases by exerting the maximum possible parental care.  I pointed out motor vehicle accidents hugely outnumbered guns as a cause of death for kids.  Drowning also caused more deaths than guns. We should, I suggested, investigate each of these deaths and if they were preventable by the parents in any way, then Mom or Dad should go to jail for failing to prevent the accident. Certainly if this was going to be an effective savior of lives regarding guns, it would work even better to save even more children from accidental death, right?

The letter was never published by the LA Times. Imagine that.

The recent hyperventilating and running around with hair on fire prompted me to revisit causes of death. Again, I visited the CDC site, which is not much easier to use now than it was then. And, again I come away with the inescapable conclusion that we are surrounded by bunch of screaming hypocrites. Let’s have some fun with numbers, shall we. And, we shall also be mindful of Benjamin Disraeli’s observation that: “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Here are some causes of death for kids ages 1-14 from 1999 to 2010, or the last 10 years. I have eliminated diseases, which are the major cause of death. Also not shown are specific causes with low occurrence rates for this age group, like falls and suicide. 

Cause of Death Ages 1-14	Deaths	Rate Per 100K Population
Motor vehicle accidents	24,076	3.5
Accidental drowning	8,974	1.3
Assault (homicide) not by firearms	6,018	0.9
Accidental exposure to smoke, fire	5,155	0.8
Accidental poisoning of all kinds	1,139	0.2
Assault (homicide) by firearm	2,855	0.4
Accidental discharge of firearms	789	0.1
Discharge of firearms, unknown intent	134	0.0
All Firearms- not  suicide	3,778	0.6

The way to read the data above is to understand that for every one hundred thousand kids ages 1 through 14, 3.5 of them were killed in a motor vehicle accident. You can see that only 0.6 died from gun discharges of all types, including accidents and murder. Another way to think about it is to understand that more than twice as many kids drowned as were killed by guns, 8,974 versus 3,778. 23% more children were accidentally poisoned to death than were accidentally shot (not murdered), 1,139 versus 923. More than twice as many were murdered by a means other than a firearm as were murdered with firearms, 6,018 versus 2,855.

Where is the outrage about swimming pools and unsupervised bathing? Or about the many unsupervised children who got into substances that poisoned them to death?

How about motor vehicles? Should we be outraged? One can reasonably argue that the motor vehicle is so necessary to our economy, way of life, and the needs of a modern society, that we must accept that some deaths will occur. Arguably, these losses are acceptable given the benefits we all enjoy as part of an active motor vehicle society. However, if we accept this argument, doesn’t that pretty much invalidate the one that starts with “if we can save just one life”?

Let’s not stop at children. Below are some selected statistics for the entire US population from 1999 to 2010. Again, I left out diseases and some causes that were miniscule in comparison to others.

So what do we find? Again, motor vehicle accidents kill nearly 15 people out of every 100,000. Non transportation related deaths are a very broad category that includes accidents of all kinds, including falls, poisonings, and, yes, gun accidents, but does not include motor vehicle accidents. Non transportation accidents make up 34.7 deaths out of 100,000; or looked at another way by taking firearms accidents out of  this category, 34.3 deaths are by accidents not including motor vehicles or guns.

Of those 34.3 non transportation/non gun deaths, you can see that poisoning kills 9 out of 100,000, while falls kill a bit more than 8. Indeed, you are almost 4 times more likely to die from falling or being poisoned than being killed by a gun (17.3 per 100K versus 4.4).

More people kill themselves by suicide without the use of firearms (5.4) than kill other people with firearms (4.0). Of course, more kill themselves with firearms (208,923 or 5.9 per 100K) as kill others with firearms (141,165 or 4.0 per 100K) as well. On the face of it, that means people are more dangerous to themselves with a gun than they are to the rest of us.

Cause of Death All Ares	Deaths	Rate Per 100K Population
Nontransport accidents	1,226,909	34.7
Motor vehicle accidents	519,177	14.7
Accidental poisoning of all kinds	316,834	9.0
Falls	293,041	8.3
Suicide by discharge of firearms	208,923	5.9
Suicide not including firearms	190,708	5.4
Assault (homicide) not by firearms	74,561	2.1
Assault (homicide) by firearms	141,165	4.0
Accidental discharge of firearms	8,842	0.3
Discharge of firearms, unkown intent	3,035	0.1
All Firearm deaths but not  suicide	153,042	4.4

The point here is that if 0.6 deaths by firearms of children age 14 and under, and indeed 4.4 deaths out of 100,000 for the entire population regardless of age, are enough for us to seriously consider throwing out the 2^nd Amendment to the Constitution, sending parents to jail, and making decent law abiding citizens defenseless in the face of criminals and others, then what more dramatic, draconian, and drastic steps must we take to deflate Poisonings, Falls, and the like?

After all, if we can save just one life…