Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's important to remember that causes of death are often also activities which carry utility and even outright life- saving capability. Accidental poisoning, for example, is often due to exposure to cleaning chemicals and drugs which have massively reduced illnesses and deaths. Spending more to make them less accessible may actually be self-defeating, in that it could well cause more deaths than it prevents, by maki…
Simply look at one line of data on anything isn't enough, but it isn't a bad place to start looking at what our actual risks are to see what the numbers on that risk are. Using that as a guide for the first things you should be concerned with helps quite a lot. Looking at the auto stats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in... I am not sure I would say massive. But today, we are surrounded by "…
Again, the stack rank isn't a bad place to start if you have no other context. But we do. We're well past that point. We all know the NTSB, Auto Companies, Insurance Companies, et al have been hammering on car safety for decades now, have been advancing auto safety about as fast as society will allow and are always conducting newer/better research.
So it remains ill-advised to use that rate (or similar well-studied risks) as some sort of reference point when considering whether a smaller risk is getting outsize attention.
> "The long term trend lines for guns are more now than ever, more concealed carry, and less deaths."
In the 70s, when it became an issue (due in large part to media crusading and 'incident news'), the long-term trends for auto fatalities were also on a downward slope from the highs of the 40s and 50s. Yet, as it turns out, we could still actually do better by allowing research into the issue and taking common-sense precautions.
Similarly with the long term trends around smoking rates, when we finally deigned to allow smoking/cancer/cessation research.
Similarly was Airplane travel, even with a bump from terrorism, the safest way to get from A to B. Yet it remains a good thing that we studied the terrorism 'problem', despite its low risk, and changed air crew procedure and hardened cockpit doors.
And the TSA stuff is nonsense, but it was and remains nonsense precisely because it's not being studied and considered in a sober cost/benefit analysis.
What remains notable about the gun debate in the US, is that we're not arguing about "what to do" so much as arguing about whether to study the problem.
Look at how the trial balloon for the "whether we should study the problem" effort only has some sliver of a chance to succeed, because it's being first aimed at a scapegoat (violent video games). It's not even a direct study of the self-evident real problem (gang violence) or its equally-obvious underlying cause (the war on some people's use of some drugs).