Doctors--Far More Dangerous Than Guns

A recent article in a Seattle Newspaper:

The Seattle Washington Post-Intelligencer article concerning Accidental deaths caused by physicians has triggered a chain of thought that resulted in a person searching the web (not me) for some statistics and doing a few calculations.

Number of physicians in the US - 700,000
Accidental deaths caused per year - 120,000
Accidental deaths/physician = 0.171


Number of gun owners in the US = 80,000,000
Number of accidental gun death / year (all age groups) = 1,500
Accidental deaths/gun owner = 0.0000188

Therefore, Doctors are approximately 9000 times more dangerous than gun owners. I've seen similar figures for accidental "caused" by doctors published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

It seems a loaded gun isn't as dangerous as a loaded/unloaded doctor. Taking it a step further, car accidents kill around 50,000 per year with less than 200 million drivers. So if we're worried about public safety, obviously we should tell Slick Willie and certain cities to stop wasting time with lawsuits against "small potatoes" like gun manufacturers. Instead they should go after the bigger culprits first, like medical schools and car manufacturers. Besides, we may need to consider arming ourselves for protection before entering hospitals.


My own additional analysis:

Number of drivers = 200,000,000
Number of car deaths = 50,000
Deaths/driver = 0.00025
(Deaths/driver) 0.00025 ÷ (Accidental deaths/gun owner) 0.0000188 = 13.3

The rate of death per driver is 13.3 times as great as the rate per gun owner.