My mom is half-scared to death of going to see her parents in Wheaton b/c of the sniper shootings. I tried to tell her that her chances of being nailed are nil. Does anyone know the odds of someone being shot and killed by this one marksman compared to the deaths of other deadly instances (traffic, armed robbery, etc)?
Statistically, she’d be much, much more likely to be killed in a car crash on her way to Wheaton. But the extraordinary nature of the sniper shootings makes people think there is actually a chance they’re next; it’s the same mentality that makes people buy lottery tickets. Odds are about nil.
That said, be safe. Aspen Hill is only 2 miles from my parents’ home, and people are getting restless around there.
Irrational fears are next to impossible to calm. To wit: Is she driving to her parents? Something like 120 people die every day in automobile accidents.
From the CDC:
U.S. Deaths/Mortality data for 2000
Number of Deaths Annually: 2,403,351
Death Rate (age-adjusted): 873.1 deaths per 100,000 population
Ten Leading Causes of Death in the U.S.:
Heart Disease: 710,760
Cancer: 553,091
Stroke: 167,661
Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease: 122,009
Accidents: 97,900
Diabetes: 69,301
Pneumonia/Influenza: 65,313
Alzheimer’s Disease: 49,558
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 37,251
Septicemia: 31,224
If we try taking all of the disease-related events out of the picture, we get a neat little bar graph like this (for age group 25-34 in 1999):
Cause of Death Number of Deaths Percentage of Deaths
MV Traffic 6,602 55.5%
Poisoning 2,355 19.8%
Drowning 446 3.8%
Fall 343 2.9%
Fire/burn 288 2.4%
Other Land Transport 279 2.3%
Other Transport 258 2.2%
Other Spec., classifiable 216 1.8%
Pedestrian, Other 199 1.7%
Suffocation 178 1.5%
Unspecified 175 1.5%
Firearm 143 1.2%
Natural/ Environment 115 1.0%
Struck by or Against 115 1.0%
Machinery 88 0.7%
Other Spec., NECN 59 0.5%
Pedal cyclist, Other 15 0.1%
Cut/pierce 12 0.1%
Overexertion 4 0.0%
Total Deaths 11,890
This list is for unintentional deaths, so we can’t include homicide (or getting snipered). Still, it puts things into some perspective. Unintentional injury (i.e. accidents) were the #1 cause of death, followed by suicide and then homicide. All in all I’d say she has a better chance of getting struck by lightning in a house she won from Ed McMahon.
If you want to narrow the query to homicide or some other specific general cause group, go to the CDC’s report engine and just hit the “submit request” button, leaving all fields set to default values. That will get you a chart of age groups versus rank, and from there you can click on the specific cause of death (i.e. homicide) to get the gory details.
The city of Washington,DC has one of the highest murder rates in the country. About 6 people are murdered every week, the 2000 population of the city is about 570,000.
The news media have been reporting 3 or 4 million people live “in the area”. This sniper business is a terrible tragedy but if he killed solely in the city and in a more conventional manner, we might not have yet heard about him from the media.
Well, this isn’t quite right. The number of homicides in DC was only 242 in 2000; this represented a nearly 50% decrease from 1990, when there were 474 (and DC was heralded as the “Murder Capital” of the US).
And your second point is false. In 1993, there was a serial killer dubbed the “Shotgun Stalker,” who terrorized some DC neighborhoods by randomly shooting people – killing several. This was all over the news then, until the guy was finally caught. But, and perhaps this is the point you were trying to make, the Shotgun Stalker didn’t make international news. I think this isn’t solely a result of the killings being in the suburbs; the heightened anxieties of a post-9/11 world make this sort of tragedy all the more tempting to media outlets.
The odds of being “snipered” are about the same as those of you being “huntered”.
Snipe is to shoot from a concealed place. Sniper is a person who snipes.
I think you want to know the odds of being sniped.
You know what I mean. To me snipered sounds better anyway.
True, and I suppose that someone detached from the situation and just looking at the numbers could make the argument that these are “irrational” fears. However, I live in the DC area and am personally scared shitless, and nobody’s going to tell me that’s an irrational fear.
On reflection, I do find it slightly odd that as a population we just sort of accept the fact that automobile travel involves fatalities. When I took driver’s ed back in the 70’s they told us that in the year prior, there were more traffic fatalities in the US in one year than in the entire Viet Nam war. But you have probably never seen protest marches with signs that say, “Stop The Killing–Close The Roads”.
We do accept it. One reason is that people tend to get a false sense of security by being in control of their car. A survey showed that 95% of people rated themselves in the top 50% of driving skill 
There’s a certain amount of denial going on here. Also habituation–cars are just a part of the background of everyday life.
OTOH, with the sniper situation, the manner of death is extraordinary, something to which we are not habituated.
In risk analysis, there are two factors to consider: The probability that a condition will occur, and the severity of that condition. I walk around in my house barefoot, even though there is a small chance I will stub my toe. But even that event occurs, it’s tolerable. However, being killed is intolerable.
Most of major causes of death listed here are disease–we take whatever precautions we can and see our doctors. Beyond that, we kind of feel it’s out of human hands and get philosophical about it. With the accidental deaths, we also take whatever precautions we can (wear seatbelts, keep poison out of reach of children, etc.).
But in the case of the sniper, events are utterly beyond our control. And that is really what is causing the fear–not the statistical possiblity of being shot, but the fact that events are out of control. The fact that there have been so many shootings and the killer is apparently eluding detection with ease is what is causing the fear. And having shot one child, he’s now making further explicit threats against children, which causes more fear in parents than even the possibility of losing their own lives.
To echo peepthis, she should go, and drive carefully.
Actually snipered sounds better to me too. Sniped sounds too much like “snipe hunting”… a cruel trick we played on newbie boyscouts when I was a youth.
E3
Check this out from http://www.ultramarathonworld.com/news_2002/n18oc02c.htm
The CDC site says there were 40,965 deaths due just to motor vehicle accidents in 1999 in the US, with a population around 260,000,000. If there are 3,500,000 people in the DC area and the motor vehicle accident rate is the same as the US in general, then there would have been about 551 in the DC area, or about 1.5 per day. So more people die on the road than by the sniper. But still, if I were in DC, I wouldn’t be standing still while waiting for my car to fill up with gas.
How about being “SnipeZ0RReD”?
People seem to be very bad as assessing risk. About 20,000 people die each year from flu; there is a vaccine that is not 100% effective in preventing flu, but it is nearly so in preventing deaths and in any case makes any case much less severe. Yet it is pulling teeth to get even medical personnel to get vaccinated. West Nile virus has killed, what 100 people in the US, maybe twice that and people are in near hysteria. Degree of control is the same for the two diseases unless you count choosing not to get vaccinated as being in control. That is why I don’t think that degree of control is the main issue in ignoring the 40,000 traffic deaths. What I do think the main issue is that people will not give up their convenience for what is, after all, a relatively mild risk. BTW, if fatal accidents had continued at the same rate per mile driven as it was, say, in 1950, there would be several times as many deaths. I guess it is a combination of better vehicles (when is the last time you heard of a blowout, which used to be relatively common) and seat belts.
A pig farmer in British Columbia dispatched 50+ prostitutes, admittedly over a period of years, not days, before anyone paid attention or even tried to find a pattern. So if the killings had been confined to blacks in DC, I doubt there would be such a furore, although the bizarre nature of the killings would have been noticed, certainly.
Can anyone explain why the police will not reveal what the guy (I suppose it could be a woman, but I doubt it) wants.
Witholding some information from the public helps ensure when the killer communicates with police, they know it’s really him and not an imposter trying to get attention or what have you.