We may some methods for quantifying how impactful a death is. A brief search led me to [1, 2] which uses "years of potential life lost before 75 years (YPLL75)"
I think it's quite important not to treat all deaths as equal. It's just a gut feeling on my part, as I don't have the qualifications to make any serious statements about this. But I feel the long awaited death of an elderly relative is vastly less impactful than the sudden death of a child. I feel as though a murder has far more negative consequences for society than the death of a smoker from disease (one obvious one is the amount of resources that must go into finding and prosecuting, incarcerating the murderer.)
So when we compare ~16,000 murders to ~500,000 deaths from smoke-related disease, we also have to compare the toll of 16,000 murder investigations. Thousands of prisoners being entered into the prison system. Thousands of appeals and court cases. As well as the cultural and social impact of having so many humans bear witness to murder and the stress of sudden, violent, loss of loved ones; this is much harder to quantify but should not be ignored.
I think it's quite important not to treat all deaths as equal. It's just a gut feeling on my part, as I don't have the qualifications to make any serious statements about this. But I feel the long awaited death of an elderly relative is vastly less impactful than the sudden death of a child. I feel as though a murder has far more negative consequences for society than the death of a smoker from disease (one obvious one is the amount of resources that must go into finding and prosecuting, incarcerating the murderer.)
So when we compare ~16,000 murders to ~500,000 deaths from smoke-related disease, we also have to compare the toll of 16,000 murder investigations. Thousands of prisoners being entered into the prison system. Thousands of appeals and court cases. As well as the cultural and social impact of having so many humans bear witness to murder and the stress of sudden, violent, loss of loved ones; this is much harder to quantify but should not be ignored.
[1] http://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu/publications/other/measuring... [2] http://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu/publications/issue-briefs/is...