A television commercial aired when I was young. It portrayed who I remember to be Dick van Dyke but may be wrong about that. First, he instructed everyone on the appropriate use of a Q-tip cotton swab. Next, he wielded one to clean is ear lobes and very explicitly instructed, “Only on the outside.” I laughed at the ad and thought it was absurd. Were they simply guarding against potential litigation about the misuse of cotton swabs? For all I know, it may have been part of a settlement from an incident.
Since that ad, like many adults, I have had my share of ear infections. I’ve had instances where my doctor has flushed ear wax from my canals with hydrogen peroxide; the motion sickness nearly made me hurl. Any legitimate medical professional will tell you, do not put a cotton swab in your ear. First, there are safer and more effective ways to remove ear wax. Second, there are many potential complications to putting a swab in your ear canal.
Still, I imagine that to this day, many people will routinely grab one and proceed to go digging in their ear canal. Perhaps they simply try to absorb water after a shower. Maybe they’re simply unaware of the risks, or closer to the truth, they simply believe that if they do it carefully, they won’t be impacted by its misuse.
What about the instances of misuse?
Being an engineer, I’ve made a career of designing new things that never existed, and sometimes that entails creatively using some things in ways that they weren’t originally intended. Inventions like Scotchgard and Post-It notes were accidental discoveries.
We use cars primarily for transportation; that’s their intended use. We may transport ourselves, someone else, or even an object (like delivery), but the gross oversimplification is that we designed vehicles to get something (you, someone, or some object) to a destination. Car companies introduce most features to accomplish this better (safer and more efficiently). Some naturally ‘misuse’ them on occasion, such as joy rides or even temporary refuge or privacy (think teenagers making out). We generally don’t object to their misuse as long as it’s not used criminally nor putting anyone in danger.
We use guns primarily for self-defense; that’s their intended use. Whenever I get into a discussion about the use of guns, the most often rebuttal is that they have a right to protect themselves (from either our government or criminals). They designed guns to stop a threat from harming you. Features vary widely with guns; I don’t pretend to understand the need to protect your home with a 30-round magazine. Some naturally ‘misuse’ guns outside of their self-protection design. You may simply enjoy shooting and regularly go to a shooting range. Similarly, you may enjoy hunting. Again, we generally don’t object to their misuse provided that it’s not used criminally nor putting anyone in danger.
When it comes to the misuse of cotton swabs, we generally don’t care. I’m curious about how many people buy them with the intent of using them in their ears, and how many people suffer permanent damage from the misuse of a Q-tip.
If we outlaw gun use, why not outlaw use of cars?
Channeling my engineering sensibilities, I remember once quipping that any physical object has mass, hence it may be used a projectile, and thus it qualifies a weapon. 😉 I understand that right to bear arms is protected by the second amendment; while I do intend to discuss this at length, I won’t address it on this particular post. You’ll just have to wait.
Having gotten into a discussion about regulating gun use, someone responded with “You can easily kill five people with a car, why don’t we outlaw them?” First, I didn’t suggest the banning of gun use in general, I merely suggested that we define rules by which specific people have different access to guns. Second, as an engineer with an open mind, I had to entertain whether that counterargument has merit.
Am I a hypocrite when it comes to guns, when cars may be just as deadly? My gut feel tells me that it’s not hypocrisy, that there’s something more to this, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then I looked it up. The number of deaths attributed to gun violence in 2021 was 45,035; the number of vehicular fatalities for the same year is 42,915. The numbers are similar enough, so that you may easily make the case that they’re equally as deadly.
However, the story doesn’t end there. In 2020, President Trump claimed that there were more white people shot by police than black people. This is statistically true and misleading. Specifically, the article points out “the rate of fatal shootings among the black community is almost three times higher per capita“. What does that translate to with respect to cars and guns? How do we compare these two concepts fairly?
Introduce a statistic to measure it
In order to compare these equitably, I’ll introduce a statistic which measures the Fatal Rate of Misuse or FROM for short. It’s a simple ratio, a fraction. FM = count of fatal misuses of that object and AP = count of appropriate use of that object for which it was designed. Then let’s evaluate each in its own merit. While we don’t know the numbers of appropriate use of cotton swabs, I imagine that the instances of fatal misuse of cotton swabs is incredibly small. We’ll ignore cotton swabs for this discussion.
Let’s calculate this for car use in 2021, at least a ballpark figure. As established above, we don’t design cars to kill, so FM = 42,915 deaths. What is the count of appropriate uses? Well, there are 143 million Americans that commute every day, that’s two trips (to and from), so that’s a total of 286 million uses per day. Assuming 50 weeks of work and 3 days of commuting, the AP is 42.9 billion trips each year.
FROM for cars = 42,915 / 42,900,000,000 = 0.0000010003 = 0.00010003% chance of death per instance of appropriate use of car
Now, let’s calculate this same statistic for gun use in 2021. We can’t use the 45,035 because, some instances of self-defense will lead to death. Fortunately, they tabulate the details, so we calculate the FM figure as 43,755 gun-violence deaths not attributed to self-defense (45,035 – 1,280). And the AP figure, appropriate use cases (not necessarily resulting in death, but deterrent) is 70,040 instances.
FROM for guns = 43,755 / 70,040 = 0.6247 = 62.47% chance of death per instance of appropriate use of gun
How do these compare?
If we compare the two, simply do the ratio:
0.6247 / 0.0000010003 = 624,496 times more likely
The misuse of guns that result in a fatality are 624,496 times more likely than the misuse of a car; that’s not a typo. Let’s compare them directly. If cars were misused in a fatal way as frequently as guns, there’d be 26,800,249,857 vehicular fatalities each year… that’s over 81.2 times our population. Or to flip it the logic, if there were only 70,040 uses of guns for self-defense each year and it was as safe as car use, there would be one death by gun misuse every fourteen years (0.07 cases per year).
Do you still think that they’re comparable? If there was only one innocent death from guns every fourteen years, I’ll be the first to say that we do not need any more gun control legislation.
Let’s imagine that we kill 26.8 billion people per year because we do not know how to safely operate our vehicles. This averages to killing our entire US population every 4.49 days by car. Do we really doubt that we would collectively be looking to curb the use of cars among some drivers? Or even outright banning their use altogether?
We can use guns responsibly
I do not object to responsible gun use; please enjoy your hunting or target shooting. I do not object to appropriate gun use, even if occasionally fatal. If that denominator grows tenfold to 700,000 cases of self-defense (scaring off a burglar, for instance), I do not object.
However, the sheer rate of fatal misuses should alarm everyone. Our apprehension to define standards by which we can minimize these fatal misuses should distress everyone. Can we think of any other object that has a FROM (fatal rate of misuse) of 62%? For instance:
- 62 people drown for every 100 that swim in a pool.
- 62 people die from a hammer for every 100 times we drive a nail.
- 62 people die from stabbing for every 100 times we cut, slice, or chop with a knife.
- 62 people die from a baseball bat for every 100 swings at a baseball.
Do those stats not sound absurd? If so, why do we tolerate them from guns?