Each year you face a 1 in 5260 chance of dying in a freeway accident. Most people I know don't worry about it at all.

In the US, ~11000 people die because of firearms every year. Assuming the US has 280 million people, you face a 1 in ~25500 chance of getting killed by firearms.

So it would be fair to say that getting yourself killed in the freeway is ~5 times more likely than getting killed by firearms.

Now, how about getting killed by a sniper? Let's say that 100 people a year die because of snipers. In other words, getting killed by a sniper is 100 times less likely than getting killed by firearms. In other words, it's ~500 times less likely than dying in a freeway accident.

If you don't worry about the freeway, you might as well ignore snipers.

Not that this means you should ignore snipers or freeway accidents. They should all be reduced. But should you live in fear about them?

Here's some worse chances we're taking with almost complete ignorance. See http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/nuclear_safety/page.cfm?pageID=182 and http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/nuclear_safety/index.cfm?pageID=25.

Especially sobering, this quote from an NRC controlling agency officer to Congress:

"The most complete and recent probabilistic risk assessments suggest core melt frequencies in the range of [one in one thousand] per reactor year to [one in ten thousand] per reactor year. A typical value is [three in ten thousand]. Were this the industry average, then in a population of 100 reactors operating over a period of 20 years, the crude cumulative probability of [a severe reactor] accident would be 45%."

Comment on Chances by James Robertson

It's not about relative chances of injury - it's about perception and news coverage. Last year, school sports events and activities were cancelled and delayed in droves - many fall sports seasons were utterly wrecked. With this, as with sales and marketing, Perception = Reality

I think the perception we "should" get from these kinds of news is that we're all scared to death of everything, we can trust nobody, and the only pleasurable activity left is to consume. Because other than your home, where is it nicer, where can you park your car? Wherever you spend money. If you don't feel like facing that, then spend what you don't have to replicate the outside world inside your property so you don't even have to go out. And exactly who benefits from all this? So in that regard I'd rather check against the freeway accident chance - which I don't worry about. Sharks, snakes, scorpions, plane crashes... all terrible things, but in my humble opinion not worth losing sleep about. And note that some of the fear injected by the media is frivolous. Compare 4 sniper deaths to 45% chance of a nuclear meltdown every 20 years.

Comment on Chances by mls

This seems to be a big issue for Americans in general.