ABSTRACT
There are about 700,000 physicians in the United States. The U.S. Institute of Medicine estimates that each year between 44,000 and 98,000 people die as a result of medical errors (Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 1999). This makes for a yearly accidental death rate per doctor of between 0.063 and 0.14. In other words, up to one in seven doctors will kill a patient each year by mistake. Take gun owners in contrast. There are 80,000,000 gun owners in the United States. Yet their errors lead to “only” 1,500 accidental gun deaths per year. This means that the accidental death rate, caused by gun-owner error, is 0.000019 per gun owner per year. Only about 1 in 53,000 gun owners will kill somebody by mistake. Doctors then, are 7,500 times more likely to kill somebody by mistake. While not everybody has a gun, almost everybody has a doctor (or several doctors), and is thus severely exposed to the human error problem.
