Is there an estimate as to what percentage of the human population at this time would be killers.
Killers to include homicides, accidents (with perpetrator still alive), wars, doctors ending lives etc etc.
Every time one human has taken another humans life.
Any dope on this statistic?
So any act by one human resulting in the death of another, whether it’s legal or illegal or even sanctioned (as in combat)?
Yes. If they killed or terminated another humans life for whatever reason and are living amongst us, they will qualify.
In cases of medical treatment to include cases where doctors negligence or prescription of wrong drugs has resulted in untimely death.
How do you even measure something like that? 150,000 people die naturally every day; how do you assign blame when the vast majority are natural processes? Blame the doc for not getting them to monitor their diabetes more aggressively? Blame the weather forecaster for minimizing the severity of the storm they went out in?
How directly do these killers have to be connected with their “victim”? Is the coal company a killer for polluting the atmosphere and causing more people to die than otherwise would have if that coal was not burned? If so, who is at fault, just the CEO, or all the miners and technicians? What if the electric power derived from that coal saved more lives than the coal killed? Does it cancel out?
Can more than one person be responsible for a particular death? If the president commanded that a soldier kill Bin Laden, and that soldier then kills Bin Laden, are both of them killers, or just the guy who pulled the trigger?
OK, we killed about 500000 people in Iraq. 1000000 in Viet Nam. 12000 murders. Maybe 100000 accidental deaths caused by another. of course, many wartime deaths were one soldier killing many, but then we have other conflicts.
So, say 2MM over all?
300 Million in the USA.
1.5%. +/-
Just a rough guess, numbers from the back of an envelope.
Current US homicide rate is 4.3/100,000 implies 15,300 murders with population of 340 million - let’s pretend one murder per murder. Let’s guess average age of murderer is about 25 when they commit the act, and lives to 75 (since death row is a long way off, most homicides are not capital punishment. So 765,000 killers in the USA who have not died yet. Actually, the homicide rate is much lower than several years ago, but this compensates for multiple homicides, multiple perps, early deaths…
About 33,000 automobile deaths last year in the USA. Let’s pull numbers out of our butt and guess say, 1/3 of cases the killer responsible survived (since many would include the driver died, and took multiple people with him) So 11,000 killers a year, and let’s guess an average age of 35 at time of act, and life expectancy of 75 again, so 40x11,000=440,000.
What about other causes? Lets say any other causes of death are much less; drowning - typically the victim’s fault, rather than a “killer” responsible. (I suppose some idiot taking an overloaded boatload out on the lake would qualify.) Accidents like chopping a tree down on someone, or such.
So we have 765,000+440,000=1,205,000
Let’s pull a number out of our butts again, and say this is much smaller… lets just round this to 1,300,000 to cover all eventualities. From 340,000,000 people, that’s 0.3%
I have no idea how to account for military “killers”, except guess that say, 5% of active military would have killed someone in war; 170,000 at peak in Iraq, 100,000 peak in Afghanistan; over 500,000 in Vietnam. Allowing for turnover, maybe we’ll say 1,000,000 soldiers. Let’s say 5% of those actual engaged in combat where they killed someone. (Is that too high? Too low?) 50,000 armed forces killers - hardly budges the total versus 1,300,000.
So for very, very round numbers it’s 60% murderers, 30% drivers, 5% soldiers and 5% everything else.
Smells about right to me. Though you subtracted out the drivers who died in their own accidents, but not murderers who died in their own crime. Adjusting for that factor would move the murderer/driver proportion closer to even.
I think your question is so vague as to be meaningless.
But just picking on the category not addressed so far, this study says
" true number of premature deaths associated with preventable harm to patients was estimated at more than 400,000 per year. ".
Study seems a bit ropey, but even if numbers greatly inflated, then it’s another significant component of your overall score, assuming it’s measuring systemic problems across the entire medical system’.
Well, not every time.
Sometimes I just give them a dirty look.
The Vietnam war proved, pretty conclusively, that nearly everyone, if given a plausible reason for doing so, would kill another human being with very little hesitation. And the “plausible reason” can be as morally ambiguous as “I was following orders”,or “It’s my job”. The very few who refused to participate may very well have done so out of fear of harm to themselves, rather than a reluctance to kill other people, diluting even further the body of people who refused to kill perfectly harmless civilians as a moral position.
The Vietnam War, more so than other wars, was characterized by a general public view that the war and the killing were immoral and the orders were transparently mendacious, but a huge majority of people called upon to participate in the slaughter were quickly turned into mindless murderers with almost no challenge to the authority.
There’s multiple victim murders, there’s multiple people involved in a murder. I assumed it evened out in the end.
Depends whether you adhere to the fine American standard of justice, where the guy who pulled the trigger in a robbery can turn state’s evidence against the getaway driver and have him sent to the electric chair instead. Are they both killers?
I made some wild-assed guesses to get those numbers. For example, one stat I heard was that only 10% of the army is on the front lines, actually in combat, and the rest are logistical support. If there were half a million casualties on the other side in Vietnam, or 200,000 in Iraq, I assume a lot were from the few bomber pilots and aerial machine guns, artillery - so a small group of actual combatants. So I guessed that half of that 10% would be directly responsible for combat deaths or collateral damages.
I have no idea how many drivers survive after causing a motor vehicle fatality, but you do hear of “drunk driver charged with killing family in other car” so it happens. Plus, if it’s a car-pedestrian thing, the driver survives. Even if it was the pedestrian’s fault, the driver still counts… So I guessed 1/3 of motor vehicle killers survive.
I think WWII proved that too - if the penalty for disobeying orders included being shot yourself, or in Vietnam, being abandoned in the jungle for who knows what to find you… There’s a really good incentive for following orders.
Plus consider that any recent report on bullying proves there’s a subset of humans quite capable of being as vicious as they think they can safely get away with.
Are people who are incarcerated considered to be “living amongst us”?
Well, they’re certainly living amongst where I work.
I think it’s between 1-2%, and it may be hardcoded into our genes. I’ll show my work below.
Recent phylogenetic research looking at 4 million recorded deaths of more than 1000 different mammalian species found that about 0.3% of all mammals die in conflict with members of their own species. Primates were 6x as likely to commit primacide (about 2%) – which jibes with the evidence of violence found in the paleohuman fossil record.
They also studied historical records. This graphic shows that deaths due to interpersonal violence has ranged widely throughout human history from as high as 25% (Post Contact New World) to the current global average of 1.3%