How do you want to die?

Clayton Cramer writes that

in 2011, there were 14,612 murders and non-negligent manslaughters in the U.S. Scary, yes. But there were 597,689 deaths from heart disease — an American is 41 times more likely to die from this than murder. There were 574,743 cancer deaths, so you are 39 times more likely to die of cancer than murder. Throw in strokes, chronic lower respiratory disease, and diabetes — all diseases which are at least in part preventable by lifestyle choices — and the total death toll is more than 1.5 million — or 103 times more likely than being murdered.

Guns prevent not just murders, but also rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults. But the same is true for lifestyle-choice illnesses: even if you do not die from them, there is a lot of other cost and hurt. Before you die of heart disease, cancer, or diabetes, it can take weeks to years before the end comes, and the outpatient, hospital, nursing care, and hospice expenditures will often demolish the assets of even a relatively wealthy person. All the robberies and burglaries of a lifetime will seldom inflict the economic losses that one really serious illness does.

If gun-control advocates were primarily concerned about reducing unnecessary deaths, the same energy would be better spent on discouraging obesity, smoking, bad eating habits, unsafe promiscuous sex, IV drug abuse, couch potatoism, alcoholism, and the rest of the lifestyle choices that contribute mightily to the lifestyle-induced deaths. These cause vastly more deaths each year than firearms.

In this respect, as much as Michael Bloomberg’s nanny-state attempt to reduce obesity by banning high-capacity soft drinks was an inappropriate use of government, at least he was on the right topic in terms of public health. Bloomberg’s own gun-control delusions, even under the most positive of assumptions, would save a tiny fraction of the number of lives.