You are correct that not all deaths are equal. Someone dying of cancer at 60 is losing maybe 20 years of life, while someone dying at 20 is losing their entire adult life. That's the concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years, which is sometimes used instead of just regular statistics.
But even so, the QALYs lost to smoking is orders of magnitude larger than that lost to murders. And car accidents don't discriminate based on age too much
>seeing every traffic crash would simply numb people to traffic crash reports — not terrify them. We are almost becoming numb to mass shootings, which is a scary thing in itself.
It's not numbness. It's just loss of interest/novelty. People aren't becoming numb to mass shootings, they just aren't as interesting or novel. They are still afraid of them. Emergency responders who see accidents every day still buckle their seat belts. More than the general population.
Anyway I am not saying that we can get the news to stop reporting on mass shootings or make people uninterested in them. I am saying that we can correct perceptions that they are more likely than other risks. We can educate people better. We can fight our own biases and strive to be more rational.
But even so, the QALYs lost to smoking is orders of magnitude larger than that lost to murders. And car accidents don't discriminate based on age too much
>seeing every traffic crash would simply numb people to traffic crash reports — not terrify them. We are almost becoming numb to mass shootings, which is a scary thing in itself.
It's not numbness. It's just loss of interest/novelty. People aren't becoming numb to mass shootings, they just aren't as interesting or novel. They are still afraid of them. Emergency responders who see accidents every day still buckle their seat belts. More than the general population.
Anyway I am not saying that we can get the news to stop reporting on mass shootings or make people uninterested in them. I am saying that we can correct perceptions that they are more likely than other risks. We can educate people better. We can fight our own biases and strive to be more rational.