Tag Archives: Ferguson

The Gun Debate: Will Science be the Answer?

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Like most people, I try not to think too much about things that upset me, but whenever there’s a fresh horror reported in the news—like the story of the six-year-old boy who survived heart surgery only to be shot and killed on a walk to the park—I am momentarily forced out of my bubble. I have to face the fact that Missouri is fourth in the nation for gun deaths. More people die here from guns than from car accidents. St. Louis has become so notorious that friends in my former city of Los Angeles—Los Angeles!—ask me how I can live in such a dangerous place.

But when I bring up the subject of gun regulations to any of my Missouri neighbors, I get the standard narrative: regulating guns won’t keep criminals from getting them; It will only hinder responsible citizens’ rights to defend themselves. After all, guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

And I agree with that. Guns are not the problem. But the epidemic of gun violence is a problem. And St. Louis is at ground zero of that epidemic. Fortunately, St. Louis also has many wonderful things about it—there are some of the country’s best hospitals and doctors saving the lives of an increasing number of young children who are getting shot. There are people working tirelessly to make things better in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods. There are moms rallying together to talk common sense about guns. And there are world class institutions, like Washington University, that are putting their energy into tackling gun violence as a public health issue.

I was fortunate to see representatives from all those groups come together on Tuesday night, when I forced myself to get out of my bubble for a few hours and attend the launch of Washington University’s year-long initiative, “Gun Violence: A Public Health Crisis.” Basically, the school’s Institute of Public Health is tackling the issue of gun violence like it’s a disease. Understand the epidemiology, risk factors, the environment, the interventions. Look at the data. Make recommendations based on real information from a diverse array of perspectives in different disciplines. That’s how the issues of tobacco deaths and automobile accidents were approached, and improved. As keynote speaker Alan Leshner said, “This is a very complex problem. There isn’t just one solution.”

That may be the hardest point to convince people of. Whenever I ask people or read commentaries about the gun debate, I hear a lot of ‘single solution’ hype. It’s because of easy access. Or it’s because of gang violence. Or untreated mental health issues. Or violent video games. Whatever the viewpoint, it is absolute in its certainty that it’s THE reason. Rarely does anyone acknowledges how complicated a situation it is and how much we really don’t know. Does closing loopholes to prevent criminals from getting guns actually work? Are guns three times more likely to be used against a family member than an intruder, as one report suggests? Does gun safety training help?

According to Leshner, no one, regardless of their views on guns, has been objecting to the collecting of data. But that wasn’t always the case. The CDC didn’t look into the effects of gun violence on health for 20 years, specifically turning away from this ‘loaded’ issue until now. As a result, we know far more about the effect of crooked teeth on periodontal disease than we do about patterns in the spread of gun violence.

I would like to know more. I’d like to make an educated decision about the pros and cons. Guns are not inherently bad, and I want the right to own one. But if I have better information that shows the risks of keeping a gun around far outweigh the rewards, I can make better decisions. I think sky diving looks fun, but I know the risks, and to me, it’s not worth the reward. Cars can be dangerous, but because we have regulations in place that make it relatively safe, I accept the risk. If someone is hurt in a car crash, I don’t condemn the car. I also don’t drive at five miles an hour because that’s safer. I survey both ends of the spectrum and find an area in between that I’m comfortable with. We live in a dangerous world, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It can’t be all or nothing.

It’s a complicated problem. There is no single solution. It’s going to take a lot of different kinds of effort on the part of a lot of different kinds of people.

So by all means, let’s not wait. Let’s try something now and pursue parallel paths as we gather the data. I started by going to a panel discussion after a long day, when I would have preferred to put my feet up and play Candy Crush Saga. It wasn’t much, my tiny attempt to emerge from my bubble. It was a ridiculously small and accomplishable action, a speck, not even an atom—a quark of effort, really.

But as any scientist will tell you, enough quarks together makes a sun.

Death Odds: Anything Scares Me

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Last month when the fearbola epidemic was at its height, I began to wonder what the odds really were of dying from such a disease—not Ebola, mind you, because I wasn’t actually worried about it, given that ebola isn’t very easy to catch.

But there are many other diseases, like malaria and tuberculosis, that kill millions of people a year. Even the flu results in thousands of deaths every year in the U.S. (the CDC’s estimated range is wide, from 3,000 to 49,000—depending on which year and how you crunch the numbers). Ebola fatalities in the U.S.? One.

This is not to minimize the horror of a disease like ebola, or the fact that well over five thousand people in the world have died from it this year. It’s just to point out that, with all the hype, it’s hard to know what to be afraid of. Two schools in Ohio closed because a staff member flew on the same aircraft as a nurse who contracted (and later recovered from) ebola. Not on the same flight, mind you, but on the same plane later the same day. If we followed that policy concerning the flu, our schools would be perpetually shut down because chances would be high that someone would have been on an airplane that at some point transported a sick person.

Besides, what are the odds of dying from a flu you catch on an airplane as opposed to dying because that airplane crashes? If you compare the mid-range fatalaties of the flu in the U.S. in a given year and compare that to flying, flying is much, much safer than getting sick. The odds of dying in a commercial plane crash in a given year is one in 11,000,000. Even if you account for people who fly a great deal, or particularly bad years for airline safety, you’re still far safer on an airplane than most other things, like on a bicycle. My husband cycles for long distances, several times a week, and it certainly looks dangerous to me—partly because few people seem to have caught on that bicycles are actually supposed to be on the road (Did you hear about the St. Louis area mayor who purposefully hit a cyclist with his car? That’s another post). All of it, motorcycles included, is safer than riding in a car.

Yet we keep driving. According to David Ropeik in How Risky Is Flying?, “People are also more sensitive about risks that are catastrophic, which kill people all at once in one place, than we are about risks that are chronic, where the victims are spread out over space and/or time. Plane crashes, therefore, get more media attention than, say, heart disease, which kills 2,200 people in the United States each day, just not all in one place at one moment.”

Now many of us in St. Louis have been at risk of our own epidemic: Fergbola. With an announcement expected any day about whether or not officer Darren Wilson will be indicted for the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in August in Ferguson (just ten miles from me), anxiety is pervasive. Restaurants are closing early, businesses are taking all their paperwork home every night, and I’ve talked to a number of families who plan to leave town when the mayhem starts. But will there be mayhem? How do we know whether we really need to be afraid?

Turns out we put too much stock in our imaginations. As Paul Slovic writes for The Washington Post, “People’s sense of risk has little to do with mathematical probability.” We judge risk based not on statistics, but on whether the activity or disease is unfamiliar, invisible, increasing, not adequately understood by experts and evokes feelings of dread. That would explain why we worry about a few ebola deaths when there are 32,000 gun deaths in this country every year. Guns in America are, sadly, not unfamiliar, invisble, or inadequately understood.

That also explains the far greater fear most people have of terrorist attacks than appliances. But it turns out that Americans are as likely to be killed by their own furniture as hit in a terrorist attack.

So what should we fear? I’ve included a fun infographic from SelectQuote Life at the bottom of this post, but here are the essentials I found in my research (not scholarly, I remind you—but I did my best to compare numbers from different sources):

Chance you’ll be killed in an airplane: One in 11 million

Bee sting: One in 5.5 million

By a shark: One in 3.7 million

Lightning: One in 1.9 million

Train: One in 1 million

Tornado: One in 450,000

Car crash: One in 5,000

Sadly, none of these death odds compare to the odds of dying of heart disease or cancer.

You have a one in six chance of dying of heart disease and a one in seven chance of dying of cancer.

Let’s compare that to a really depressing statistic: Odds you’ll win the Powerball grandprize? One in 175 million. We have a much better chance of being hit by an asteroid (one in 74 million). . . yet we keep rolling the dice, so to speak. We’re far more influenced by our fear of the unfamiliar or catastrophic than we are by probability.

For my part, I find the numbers reassuring. They remind me that much fear is perception. Putting too much stock in perceived danger is a waste of time and energy. America, like me, sometimes has an overactive imagination, and it’s human nature to get a little too caught up in the media and the chatter and the hype (the feartainment, shall we say? Okay, I’ll stop).

We’re all going to go, and we don’t know when or how. We can prepare. . . a little. But the best we can do is trust our highest instincts, not our basest fears. As Gertrude Stein said, “Anything scares me, anything scares anyone but really after all considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening.”