Unnecessary causes of death are surprising. For Canada, for instance:
Traffic & highway fatalities 3300/yr, so far a relatively constant figure.
Medical errors by doctors in hospitals 10,000/yr
Drug overdoses; now nearing 8,000/yr and rising
The only relatively “good” figure is murders which are between 700 and 800 per year.
Remarkable, a murder rate that’s very similar to the murder rates of Idaho, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Utah, and Hawaii.
The population of Canada (around 35 million)is about the same as that of California. During the time when Detroit had 1.5 million people, it had more murders per year than all of Canada.
If we could only cede Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, DC, St. Louis, and New Orleans to Canada, then WE would be a low murder rate country.
On the other hand, Canada’s suicide rate is very close to ours, driven largely by the high suicide rate of the native Inuits.
You could get away from the drug problems and murder problems, which are related, if you move to Canada. It’s a beautiful place with a lot going for it.
Agree; most crime rates and other statistics are very similar. Common crime such as theft is very similar to the US. The national murder rate distorts everything. Someone argued on TV the other day that with very strict gun controls, such as outlawing gun ownership, as in Japan, the US murder rate would drop very fast. Canadians need a license for a hand gun. As a teenager I owned both a shotgun and a 22 caliber Mossberg repeater rifle to shoot rabbits in the field and shoot pigeons off our barn roof. Both could be ordered from the Sears catalogue.
But imagine a deranged teenager trying to kill 15 school children with a KNIFE! The ARA does not seem to get the point.
James Michener, a respected author wrote a book called Centennial, in 1976. He concluded that on the American frontier as many settlers were killed by their guns going off accidentally than by hostile Indians.
The Canadian frontier was ruled by the Mounties who basically forbade handguns and ruled with an iron fist. Whiskey runners from Montana were their biggest problem.
Thank you, but Canada has lots of drug problems related to overdoses. It has replaced alcohol as the worst problem. The ties to crime are less so.
I tend to agree, but I’m not exactly unbiased
A doctor damaged my mom’s nerves during a procedure . . . nerves which were absolutely unrelated to anything he was doing . . . and the result was problems which affected my mom’s eyesight
As for me, during junior high school, during one of the routine medical exams which all students undergo, the practitioner, nurse, or whatever, correctly identified a problem with me, a problem I was unaware of. But instead of notifying the appropriate individual(s) they sat on this important information. And my situation continued to develop, to the point that I literally have a physical deformity. In my case, it was an error in judgment committed by a member of the medical community.
Mistakes had lifelong consequences for my mom and I
Japan’s low murder rate is mostly a cultural thing and it would be much lower than that of the U.S. even if they didn’t have strict gun laws. Their overall murder rate is about 1/10 that of the U.S. which means that U.S. murders by methods other than guns would still have the our murder rate triple that of Japan’s.
About 60 percent of gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides yet Japan’s suicide rate is higher than that of the U.S.
On the American frontier, I would suspect that more people got killed by their horses than by either firearm accidents or Indians.
Even today, a policeman in the US is more likely to die of an on the job accident than by being shot.
In the decade from from 2007 to 2016, 1512 officers lost their lives in the line of duty. Shooting only accounted for 537 of those deaths.
Aircraft accidents 21
Auto crash 393
Beaten 9
Bicycle accident 1
Boating accident 3
Bomb related incidents 10
Drowning 20
Electrocution 4
Falls 21
Horse riding accidents 2
Job related illness 270
Motorcycle crash 67
Poisoning 1
Stabbing 12
Strangled 4
Falling object 1
Struck by trains 3
Struck by cars 127
Terrorist attacks 6
Could this come back to cars, please?
It DID come back to cars . . .
B.L.E. listed “struck by cars, motorcycle crash, auto crash”
One point I wanted to make was that auto deaths, although increasing, are relatively low compared to many other preventable deaths.
The auto industry deserves credit for making cars as safe as they are, although it took legislation to get there.
I personally believe that cars, even those of the horseless carriage era were safer than the horses and buggies they replaced. I’ve said for a long time that horses likely killed more cowboys in the old west than hostile encounters with outlaws and Indians.
Of course Hollywood presented a highly romanticized version of cowboys and their life. If they wanted authentic, they would have been dressed like hobos.
The fact that a lot of high end cars have way more safety features than the government demands makes me think that consumer demand has a lot to do with it.
In Los Angeles, they have the Autry Museum of Western Heritage
They show outfits that actors wore in movies . . . and the outfits that people wore in real life, “back in the day”
They’re nothing alike
They also have several vintage photographs, and the people look nothing like the people in the movies from the 1950s and 1960s, for example. Common folks didn’t look or dress like John Wayne or Randolph Scott
Like I said before, I don’t like horses. Never have. We don’t get along very well, so if cars are ever eliminated, I will not get a horse. I will get a new bike, but I’ll put a motor on it.
One thing though when you are looking at the stats in other countries, you have to consider the homogeneous nature of the population. Japan is not like Chicago by a long shot. Even Europe until recently were largely a single culture.
Back to eliminating cell phones, uh, I mean cars. Yeah sure we want safe cars and safe roads, but with the freedom to travel by whatever means we want comes risk. There are worse things than death, where we are all heading sooner or later.
I’m severely allergic to horse hair, so if cars are eliminated, I’ll ride a bike or walk
I think the insurance industry has a lot to do with added safety features and safety legislation. IIHS/HLDI represent almost all auto insurers. Safety features in general reduce payouts, but they don’t seem to reduce policy costs to us.
I would question that assumption. Making a car safer in a collision does not necessarily make the car cheaper to repair after a collision. Some minor collisions even leave you with a functional “totaled” car.
The thing about living in an economy with a free market is that costs almost never go down due to near constant inflation. You’ll never see insurance or healthcare costs drop significantly, but if your rates haven’t increased in the last decade, cost controls are working. Sometimes cost controls manifest as slower growth.