[Col. Mustard]

A friend of mine sent me these stats. I think I've seen them (or similar) before, but I don't guess it hurts to refresh the perspective:


Number of physicians in the United States 700,000
Accidental deaths caused by physicians per year 120,000
Accidental deaths per physician 0.171
Number of firearm owners in the U.S. 80,000,000
Number of accidental firearm deaths per year 1,500
Accidental deaths per firearm owner 0.0000188
Doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than firearms owners. --From the Benton County News Tribune, 17 November 1999

And the doctors are whining about the gun owners? Go figure. :rolleyes: :confused:

[Jim V]

Remember, everybody has to have a doctor, not everybody has a gun.

I may have to print those numbers on business cards and hand thm out to any doctors that decide they have to lecture me on firearms.

[WyldOne]

okay that talks about accidental deaths...but what about homicides?

[Gunslinger]

Thank you Clueless. Your posting this when you did is ironic. Just last night I was telling Denise about those figures but could not remember where to find them. I had told her if I could not find them I would ask if anyone else in the Triple F family had them.

Denise, the FBI keeps statistics on the number of crimes, including homicides, in the country for each year. Again, I do not remember the exact figures for the past few years but they are well under the number of deaths by guns combining accidents and intentional when compared to deaths by doctors.

Does anyone have the figures for the cause of deaths in the country listed by order? This is something else that we talked about that I would like to see. I'm referring to the ones that show the number of deaths caused by automobiles, swimming pools, eletricty, guns, etc. each year. I know that guns are some where in the neighborhood of number six or seven on the list.

[Col. Mustard]

I think these numbers are on the site of the Center for Disease Control (cdc.gov, I think). I think I orginally got to them through a link from gunsite.com. (edit: that should be guncite. Gunsite is Jeff Cooper's place. silly me...) I'll take a look...

[ 10-02-2001: Message edited by: Clueless in Charlotte ]

[Col. Mustard]

Just took this off the CDC site:


Leading Causes of Death
(All figures are for U.S.)

Ten Leading Causes of Death in the U.S.: (1998)
Heart Disease: 724,859
Cancer: 541,532
Stroke: 158,448
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: 112,584
Accidents: 97,835
Pneumonia/Influenza: 91,871
Diabetes: 64,751
Suicide: 30,575
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 26,182
Chronic Liver Disease and Cirrhosis: 25,192
Source: National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 48, No. 11

I'm going to guess that the cause of the accidental deaths by doctors rountinely gets misreported as whatever illness they were supposed to be curing...

BTW, according to the guncite.com site, 65% of homicides (in 1998) were committed with firearms; 52% with handguns.

And this link (http://webapp.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate.html) should provide every possible combination of injury stats.

[ 10-02-2001: Message edited by: Clueless in Charlotte ]