Risk and Human Perception of Risk

I have a good friend who I met once in DC for a baseball game.  We were going to park near my hotel on Capitol Hill, and Metro to RFK where the Nats played back then (the new park opened in 2008).

My proposal was just to leave my bags in his car.  He insisted that I should check my bags at the hotel, because "Capitol Hill is so dangerous!"  Now, this was 2006, long after 9-11; Capitol Hill was NOT dangerous, at all, especially not during the day.

He brushed aside my protests.  "You don't live around here.  I'm always reading about crimes and violence in the paper."  I asked how he could read about NOT crimes and NOT violence in the paper, since those things are never there.  The fact is that the crime rate (robberies, assaults, burglaries, thefts) had fallen dramatically in the area, but that's not "news." (The comparison I was making is 2001 vs. 2006). 

Crimes and violence are news.  But no neighborhood in DC makes the top 25 "most dangerous" list.  Even though it's true "you always read about it."

More recently, I had a conversation with a staff person.  She says she never flies. I was sympathetic:  "Yes, the indignities of TSA and those cattle car planes are pretty bad."  She protested:  "No, that's not it.  I'm afraid of getting killed.  All you ever read about is all those crashes!"  Um....wow.  Yes, I suppose that's all you "read about."  Because "another 30,000 planes land safely" (the actual number of flights in the US each day) is not very newsworthy.  Flying is a ridiculously safe way to travel, compared to driving to work (which this woman does every day).

The fact is that the "epidemic" of school shootings is not an epidemic at all.  They are very infrequent, occur for essentially random causes, and are not even worth considering as a public policy problem.  Violence, deaths, injuries...almost any measure you can think has gotten much better, at the same time that we are obsessed with school shootings.

Would I be upset if my son, or someone I knew, were killed?  Of course.  Do I have the right to divert public policy discussions from real problems, like drunken driving or the insane war on drugs, because of a low-probability random accident less likely than a lightning strike?  Of course not.