Cumulative Risk and Complacency

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA, has an interesting essay about our comprehension of risk in the New York Times.

His thesis is that in our society we become inured to everyday risks that are more likely to hurt us and overemphasize risks that are extremely unlikely. We're more afraid of events that we can't control — extremely low-probability occurrences such as crazed gunmen, terrorist attacks and plane crashes — than we are of much higher probability events that we can control, such as falling in the shower, dying in a car accident, lung cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

My mother-in-law recently broke her hip crossing the street (falling can be fatal in the elderly), so his point about falls hits close to home:

Life expectancy for a healthy American man of my age is about 90. (That’s not to be confused with American male life expectancy at birth, only about 78.) If I’m to achieve my statistical quota of 15 more years of life, that means about 15 times 365, or 5,475, more showers. But if I were so careless that my risk of slipping in the shower each time were as high as 1 in 1,000, I’d die or become crippled about five times before reaching my life expectancy. I have to reduce my risk of shower accidents to much, much less than 1 in 5,475.

This logic applies to all sorts of events in our lives besides showering: driving, chopping wood, cleaning the gutters, cutting tree branches, and so on. I know three guys, one of whom nearly died, who have suffered extremely serious injuries either falling off a roof or getting hit by heavy tree branches.

This means that you're more likely to get hurt performing a small-risk mundane task repetitively that lulls you into a sense of complacency and carelessness. Like carrying a gun everywhere you go.

If, for example, there's a 1 in 10,000 chance that you'll accidentally shoot yourself or someone else each day you carry a gun, over a ten-year period the chance grows to 30% (1 - [1 - 0.0001] ^ 3650), and 52% over 20 years.

What determines that basic chance? Basically, how smart and careful you are. Consider the Kansas man who accidentally shot his wife at dinner in a steakhouse when he reached into his pocket. Why was there a round in the chamber? Why wasn't the safety on?

If the NRA has its way, we will have far more to fear from getting shot at dinner by poorly trained gun owners scratching themselves than we do from nutcases like James Holmes shooting up movie theaters.

People who love guns like to think they make them safer, but they actually become a menace to everyone around them. But most of all, you endanger yourself: you're much more likely to commit suicide or accidentally discharge the weapon and hit yourself or a family member than you are to stop a gunman. And even if you do encounter a gunman, the very act of pulling a gun puts you at greater risk.

Consider the case of Dan McKown, who was carrying a legal concealed weapon in 2005 when a shots rang out at a Tacoma Mall in Washington state:

Gun drawn, McKown scanned for the shooter. But the gunshots stopped. Unsure what had happened, McKown tucked his pistol back under his coat — just as the shooter walked right in front of him.

"So anyway, I'm standing there like Napoleon Bonaparte, with his hand, you know, in his jacket," he recalls. "So I said, 'Young man, I think you need to put your weapon down.' "

That moment of vulnerability gave the other guy just enough time to shoot McKown. The bullet hit his spine, and he found himself unable to aim his own gun.

"I prayed the most un-Christian prayer of my life, which was: 'God, please let me shoot this guy before he kills somebody else.' Because I was sure I was dead," McKown says. "Then he hit me again, again, again. And he spun me like a pinwheel."

McKown made himself a target and got himself shot. He may have also prevented further bloodshed, because after that the shooter holed up in a store with hostages.

Arguably the right thing to do in that case was to take cover, keep the gun out until the shooter's location was established, and then plug him in the back without warning. The problem is that McKown had no badge or police uniform, and any cop or other person with a concealed weapon coming onto the scene should follow that same advice and unknowingly shoot a "good guy" with a gun.

Which brings us to the real point: untrained amateurs should not be walking around with loaded guns in their purses, pockets or waistbands, like Plaxico Burress or the idiot who shot himself in the penis. If you're going to be armed with concealed weapons in public, you should be required to follow the same training and safety standards as law enforcement professionals. That doesn't mean some hokey two-hour training course. That means dozens of hours of training, drills, target practice, tests and live-fire simulations. And anyone caught with a gun in his pants should have a mandatory three-month stint in the workhouse.

The Second Amendment does, after all, speak of a well-regulated militia.