Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

50. The complete dataset for figure 12-6 shows a puzzling rise in deaths from falls starting in 1992, which is inconsistent with the fact that emergency treatments and hospital admissions for falls during this period showed no such rise (Hu & Baker 2012). Though falls tend to kill older people, the rise cannot be explained by the aging of the American population, because it persists in age-adjusted data (Sehu, Chen, & Hedegaard 2015). The rise turns out to be an artifact of changes in reporting practices (Hu & Mamady 2014; Kharrazi, Nash, & Mielenz 2015; Stevens & Rudd 2014). Many elderly people fall down, fracture their hip, ribs, or skull, and die several weeks or months later from pneumonia or other complications. Coroners and medical examiners in the past tended to list the cause of death in these cases as the immediate terminal illness. More recently, they have listed it as the precipitating accident. The same number of people fell and died, but increasingly the death was attributed to the fall.

51. Presidential reports: “National Conference on Fire Prevention” (press release), Jan. 3, 1947, http://foundation.sfpe.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/presidentsconference1947.pdf; America Burning (report of the National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control), 1973; American Burning Revisited, U.S. Fire Administration/FEMA, 1987.

52. Firefighters as EMTs: P. Keisling, “Why We Need to Take the ‘Fire’ out of ‘Fire Department,’” Governing, July 1, 2015.

53. Most poisonings are from drugs or alcohol: National Safety Council 2016, pp. 160–61.

54. Opioid epidemic: National Safety Council, “Prescription Drug Abuse Epidemic; Painkillers Driving Addiction,” 2016, http://www.nsc.org/learn/NSC-Initiatives/Pages/prescription-painkiller-epidemic.aspx.

55. Opioid epidemic and its treatment: Satel 2017.

56. Opioid overdoses perhaps peaking: Hedegaard, Chen, & Warner 2015.

57. Age and cohort effects in drug overdoses: National Safety Council 2016; see Kolosh 2014 for graphs.

58. Drug use down in teenagers: National Institute on Drug Abuse 2016. The declines continued through the second half of 2016: National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Teen Substance Use Shows Promising Decline,” Dec. 13, 2016, https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/news-releases/2016/12/teen-substance-use-shows-promising-decline.

59. Bettmann 1974, pp. 69–71.

60. Quoted in Bettmann 1974, p. 71.

61. History of workplace safety: Alrich 2001.

62. Progressive movement and worker safety: Alrich 2001.

63. The steepening of the drop from 1970 to 1980 in figure 12-7 is probably an artifact from aggregating different sources; it is not visible in the continuous data series from National Safety Council 2016, pp. 46–47. The overall trend in the NSC dataset is similar to that in the figure; I chose not to show it because the rates are calculated as a proportion of the population rather than the number of workers, and because they contain an artifactual drop in 1992, when the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries was introduced.

64. United Nations Development Programme 2011, table 2.3, p. 37.

65. The example is from “War, Death, and the Automobile,” an appendix to Mueller 1989, originally published in the Wall Street Journal in 1984.

CHAPTER 13: TERRORISM

1. Fear of terrorism: Jones et al. 2016a; see also chapter 4, note 14.

2. Western Europe as war zone: J. Gray, “Steven Pinker Is Wrong About Violence and War,” The Guardian, March 13, 2015; see also S. Pinker, “Guess What? More People Are Living in Peace Now. Just Look at the Numbers,” The Guardian, March 20, 2015.

3. More dangerous than terrorism: National Safety Council 2011.

4. Homicide in Western Europe versus the United States: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2013. The average homicide rate of the 24 countries classified as Western Europe in the Global Terrorism Database was 1.1 per 100,000 people per year; the figure for the United States in 2014 was 4.5. Road traffic deaths: The average of the Western European countries’ road traffic death rates for 2013 was 4.8 fatalities per 100,000 people per year; the US rate was 10.7.

5. Deaths in insurgencies and guerrilla warfare now counted as “terrorism”: Human Security Report Project 2007; Mueller & Stewart 2016b; Muggah 2016.

6. John Mueller, personal communication, 2016.

7. Contagion of mass killings: B. Cary, “Mass Killings May Have Created Contagion, Feeding on Itself,” New York Times, July 27, 2016; Lankford & Madfis 2018.

8. Active shooter incidents: Blair & Schweit 2014; Combs 1979. Mass murders: Analysis of FBI Uniform Crime Report Data (http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/) from 1976 to 2011 by James Alan Fox, graphed in Latzer 2016, p. 263.

9. For a graph that expands the trends using a logarithmic scale, see Pinker 2011, fig. 6-9, p. 350.