Tag Archives: OKC

Violence in America

Red Dog Saloon

Red Dog Saloon

Okay, I admit it. I’ve been reading too much and I came across some statements that I simply found difficult to believe. So I go to the CDC website and find the latest statistics (2013) on Causes of Death. It seems that there were 821.5 deaths for every 100,000 people in this country during the latest year on record. Of those, 185 were from malignant neoplasms, 252 were from major cardiovascular diseases, 24 from diabetes, 2 from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), 27 from Alzheimer’s disease, 18 from influenza and pneumonia, 47 from chronic lower respiratory diseases, 101 from all other diseases, 41 from accidents and 13 from intentional self-harm (suicide). It seems that almost 15 people per 100,000 die from drug-induced causes and a little over 9 die from alcohol-induced reasons. At his juncture you might be wondering why I made a point of citing these numbers. It’s because I read that a person in America is much more likely to die from taking their own life or partying than from violence. It seems that the CDC found that only 1.6 people per 100,000 people in America die from assault (homicide). You don’t have to take my word for it. Simply Google “death statistics 2013″ and look for cdc.gov to find the data. To put it mildly, I was amazed. I looked through all that data, did a little pondering, and wondered how 10 times as many people could take their own life as opposed to people committing all the violence I hear about and in the end I was totally clueless about it. Then I realized that the odds were that I was 15 times as likely to have died from partying than from someone trying to kill me. After I thought about that for a while I really only had one question – I wondered “Is the Red Dog is still in operation?”