Ryan McFarland

I received the below email message today and it gave me feelings.

Subject: Humor: statistics
Number of physicians in the US: 700,000.
Accidental deaths caused by physicians per year: 120,000.
Accidental deaths per physician… 0.171 (U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services)
Number of gun owners in the US: 80,000,000.
Number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups) 1,500.
Accidental deaths per gun owner: 0.0000188
Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.
“FACT: Not everyone has a gun, but everyone has at least one Doctor.”
Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets out of hand.
As a Public Health Measure I have withheld the statistics on Lawyers for fear that the shock could cause people to seek medical aid.

Obviously this was an attempt at humor. But being a fan of statistics i decided to take a further look. Having heard this set before I thought I�d add some other statistics. I believe there is a fallacy in the �Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners� statement since intentional deaths are not calculated. I know the intent was humor but this really is a serious issue. So let’s do a little research about intentional harm done to others to accurately view the “danger” of gun owners.

In 2002 there were 442,880 non-fatal victims of rape, assault, and robbery that involved a firearm. (US Department of Justice)

In 2002, about 67% of all murders, 42% of all robberies, and 19% of all aggravated assaults that were reported to the police were committed with a firearm. (US Department of Justice)

The FBI’s Crime in the United States estimated that 67% of the 16,204 murders in 2002 were committed with firearms. (That would be 10,856 victims.)

I suppose it would be nice to add in legal deaths committed by police or military with firearms but these numbers seem to be a little more difficult to come by.

Adding the accidental deaths to the intentional murders and violent crimes (and assuming that the �intentional� deaths caused by physicians are statistically insignificant) I get .0057 injured victims of violent crimes, murders, or accidental deaths per firearm owner.

Shall we make a few assumptions? Perhaps a percentage of those visiting physicians are chronically ill, suffering from a major injury, or otherwise unhealthy. I doubt many of the accidental deaths are caused by a visit to a physician for a sprained ankle, to get stitches, or for a sore throat. So let�s assume that these �accidents� are largely caused while performing open heart surgery, emergency room operations for an accident victim, or under some other condition where the �victim� would have most likely died if there wasn�t a physician available in the first place.

I would be willing to bet that a few out of every hundred of these “accidental deaths” caused by physicians are actual mistakes that caused a healthy person to die from something that would not have happened otherwise. How many of these “accidental” deaths are from mis-diagnosis? How many from clerical errors, coding mistakes, or lab errors? If we add all hospital staff that may have had something to do with the fatality I think the statistic would be further diluted.

By the way, I do own a firearm.