We're talking about choices an individual homeowner can make.
Those choices are "install a pool" or "keep a gun in the house".
To understand the risks for those two choices, total drownings and total gun deaths of children in the country aren't relevant to an individual's choice.
To get a useful statistic, you need to know how many children died in their home pool in the sample group of homeowners w/ pools, and how many children died from a gun in the home in the sample group of homeowners w/ guns in the house.
Because that's the choice -- do I put myself in this sample group or not?
Think about powered trampolines -- suppose there are only five installed in the country, and on two of them a child has died this past year. That's a HORRIBLE risk, but with your method of assessment, it doesn't even show up.
If you're thinking of installing this kind of trampoline, I'd highly recommend my method of analysis over yours.
The real questions is, of the people who are within harms way of home swimming pools, how many suffer injuries, and of the people who are within harms way of fire arms, how many suffer injuries.
Both are not that easy to measure, especially firearms, but looking at absolute causes of death is clearly nonsense.
You should really be using the number who were killed by a gun kept in their home for this comparison. Also, there are other ways to die in a pool aside from drowning.
Plus as I said, the drowning statistics above are a huge over-estimation as they don't give individual breakdowns of the context of the drowning (e.g. pools, boats, bathtub, etc).
It's simple math.
And yes, the Maths is simple. But gathering the right figures to plug into the Maths is hard.
I don't understand. This seems sensible to me. Why wouldn't we include this figure to calculate risk? Isn't risk a matter of incidences/exposures?
For instance, if in 2008 376 children died by gun at home and as much as 376000 families had a gun at home, then the risk would be 0.1%. But if the number of families with a gun at home were 752, then this would mean a risk of 50%!
It makes complete sense. We take number of children (i.e. population) and we take the number of times something bad occurs to that population, and that gives us our level of risk per each individual (e.g. 1 in 100,000 or similar).
If we follow the logic of your argument then we start getting into stupid territory very quickly indeed. For example, how many bees are there in the US? And how many people die of bee stings? Well given the number of bees Vs. bee sting deaths we can calculate that you have more chance of winning the lottery two times than dying of a bee string, right? ... Well no, that makes no sense at all.
Basically gun advocates are abusing statistics. They're arguing that keeping two guns in your gun safe instead of one makes guns twice as safe! And four guns is twice as safe again! So as they increase guns the guns get safer and safer, isn't that wonderful...
Zero people in my town were attacked by lions last year, but I'm sure a few were attacked by dogs. Cool! Lions are way safer than dogs!
UnoriginalGuy, I'd suggest taking a step back from your argument for a minute. Every single response here has explained the flaw in your original claim. It might be worth taking a minute to understand where you could have gone wrong in your reasoning.
Here's the quote from Freakonomics:
"In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million-plus guns"
And then the author draws conclusions based on that. It says nothing about "drowning in a pool" - only drowning. It says nothing about death by a gun at the gun owner's house. It says nothing about households with multiple guns (nor households with multiple pools, I guess).
The point UnoriginalGuy was trying to make is that this is absolutely shoddy statistics at work. Now his statistics may be equally as shoddy, but he's not selling books about this stuff.
So what you're saying is [deaths of children by gun]/[number of children]. That's not an absolute number, 1 in 100000 is just a percentage disguised (0.01%).
My only remark on your comment is that only children living in houses that have a gun should be taken into account when calculating the risk of "having your child killed by a gun that you keep in your house".
> So drowning is is roughly 2x as dangerous as guns
Drowning kills 100% of people who drown, so it's certainly more dangerous than guns.
Replace drowning with "pools" and there might be something more reasonable to compare, though hard to know what should be compared.
I heard from a person that had to go through helicopter rescue training that they're, in their course of training, required to drown at one point; and then, after drowning, are brought back up and revived.
Drowning may kill a large percentage of the people that drown, but it's not a guaranteed death-sentence.
Being shot to death kills 100% of people who are shot to death. I don't think you have a valid point.
Cars are getting more survivable, and almost certainly safer, too, but do numerical comparisons with numbers from the past remain valid in light of external influences on these outcomes?
In this case, improvements in trauma care may mask both brain injury from lack of oxygen and serious disability from gun accidents in this comparison. Or we don't know the methodology and they could be counting ER visits, which might provide a better comparison.
That is nonsense, the way Freakonomics got that 100x more dangerous figure makes absolutely no sense.
Don't get me wrong - pools likely are more dangerous than guns. I'm just arguing that they aren't 100x more dangerous than guns.
In 2008 there were 376 deaths of "children" (aged 14 and below) by gun. In the same year there was 791 deaths by drowning (all sources).
So drowning is is roughly 2x as dangerous as guns but that is drowning from ALL sources, so that doesn't imply that pools are 2x more dangerous as guns since that ignores other sources of potential drownings (e.g. boats, bathtub, etc).
This data is all from the CDC's own web-site (http://wonder.cdc.gov).
What the Freakonomics guys did was take the above numbers and then use the total number of guns and total number of pools, and then abuse those statistics in order to try and get this 100x more dangerous figure.
In interviews he has essentially said he is a pro-gun advocate so that is something to keep in mind too...
As I said at the start, drowning is MORE dangerous than guns (2x). It is just not 100x more dangerous unless you're trying to measure the danger level of each individual gun rather than by measuring the risk to a fixed population (i.e. the danger from the average US child's perspective).