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means that roughly 550 children under the age of ten drown each year.) Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million- plus guns. (In a country with an estimated 200 million guns, this means that roughly 175 children under ten die each year from guns.) The likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isnt even close: Molly is roughly 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident at Imanis house than in gunplay at Amys. But most of us are, like Mollys parents, terrible risk assessors. Peter Sandman, a self-described “risk communications consultant” in Princeton, New Jersey, made this point in early 2004 after a single case of mad-cow disease in the United States prompted an antibeef frenzy. “The basic reality,” Sandman told the New York Times, “is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very dif- ferent.” Sandman offered a comparison between mad-cow disease (a super- scary but exceedingly rare threat) and the spread of food-borne pathogens in the average home kitchen (exceedingly common but somehow not very scary). “Risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control,” Sandman said. “In the case of mad-cow, it feels like its beyond my control. I cant tell if my meat has prions in it or not. I cant see it, I cant smell it. Whereas dirt in my own kitchen is very much in my own control. I can clean my sponges. I can clean the floor.” Sandmans “control” principle might also explain why most people are more scared of flying in an airplane than driving a car. Their think- ing goes like this: since I control the car, I am the one keeping myself safe; since I have no control of the airplane, I am at the mercy of myr- iad external factors. So which should we actually fear more, flying or driving? It might first help to ask a more basic question: what, exactly, are we afraid of? Death, presumably. But the fear of death needs to be nar- rowed down. Of course we all know that we are bound to die, and we
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