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I hear ya. That is exactly why I hate traffic death statistics. The number of motorists goes up each year too, ya know?



The number of miles driven needs to be taken into account too. Different topic but same subject (Statistics). A book by John Lott called "More Guns Less Crime." He is a statistician who set out to prove that gun control saves lives. When he got beyond the hype and looked at the real numbers he found the opposite. That despite the accepted conventional wisdom that more people carrying guns would cause shootings to increase, they actually went down and reduced all violent crime as well. Extensively footnoted and, as you can imagine, an NRA favorite. Unlike many politically motivated “researchers” he was honest enough to change his theory to match the facts rather than the other way around.

We all like to think of ourselves as rugged individualists. But when push comes to shove most of us are sheep who do what we are told. Worst of all, a lot of us become unpaid agents of whoever is controlling the agenda by enforcing the current dogma on the few rugged individualists who actually exist.