Excerpt for the Day: It’s Time to Ban Swimming Pools
John Stossel, from his excellent column last week about our media-influenced perceptions of risk (bold is mine):
What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for “20/20,” I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I’m sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.
Parents don’t know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.
Media exposure clouds our judgment about real-life odds.
Stossel didn’t express the sentiment I’ve inserted into the post title, but given the viewpoints frequently voiced by the anti-gun crowd, he certainly, and sarcastically, could have.
