This doesn’t super surprise me. Driving should be taken more seriously. You’re controlling a 2 ton death machine and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Cars are not designed to inflict harm. This cheap false equivalence tells us a lot.

Neither of these topics should even be drawing media attention, considering how frequent and non-notable they are. They just report on this stuff every day because it's cheaper and easier than exclusively finding and reporting on real notable local news, and television news needs filler content for selling ad spots. Ever had a day where there was no news, and they ended early?

Road deaths are typically viewed as a risk we take while going about our day, while firearm deaths are either an intentional act, or someone doing something very stupid.

How many people drive a car daily in this area?

Fuck cars and guns, ban both.

If guns are so alike to cars, why not require a license that you get by passing a written test on gun safety and a practical test on basic competence and safe usage?

Driving is orders of magnitude more likely to kill you at any second you're in a car, than flying is at any second you're in a plane.

People who are terrified of flying will get in a car and drive like a monkey like it's no big deal.

One of these things is purpose-built for the deliberate infliction of harm. The other is vastly more popular and merely causes harm through negligence.

Sort of like the American political parties, I guess

I think the math works out that each year the average American has roughly 1 in 10,000 chance of dying in a car crash and a 1 in 200 chance of being injured in a car crash (Though the second stat likely leaves out a lot of unreported injuries). The average American rolls those dice once a year, so plan to live til 75? 1 in 133 chance that you die in a car crash, >1 in 3 chance you're injured in a car crash at some point.

I've known two people who died in car crashes, and at least several dozen who were injured in crashes including several really gnarly pedestrian bystander injuries. And I'm barely middle aged.

That is a pretty high number of shootings then. Practically everyone drives so that is a lot of miles/person. You have to drive, you don't have to be shot, that is why it draws media attention.

Traffic engineers use decades-old manuals that ignore safety in favour of driver convenience. This has to change. Streets built by them are a huge public safety issue.

We should never accept crashes that result in serious injuries or deaths as if they are an inevitable force of nature or something. They're merely a predictable outcome of a badly built system.

I guess it's because one of these things is a widely used tool, a requirement for work / living in the USA and gives people freedom.

The other is just car.

This is especially surprising to me because Chicago is one of the few US cities with decent public transportation, so there's a significant percentage of people that aren't driving.

Dumb question: which one draws more media attention in Chicago?

In my own experience (not Chicago), the local news is dominated by where the rush-hour crash is today, while national news talks way more about gun deaths.

I'm going to go with the general vibe of Lemmy here and assume you mean that auto deaths need to get more attention in America. To that I would say there is a general cultural attitude that cars are a necessary evil (even among most people who don't outright love them, which is a huge demographic), and fixing the zoning and infrastructure would take decades and many tens of billions of dollars to restructure a large city around public transit. Besides bumper-sticker-slogan politics ("more public transit!") there are precious few real, concrete plans for getting from the current situation to the car-free utopia.

Even then, you'd not eliminate cars entirely. Among the more developed western European nations that are known for good public transit, Ireland seems (at a quick glance) to have the fewest cars per person at 536 per 1,000, while the car-happy US has 850/1,000. So best case, you reduce cars by ~35%.

Gun deaths, on the other hand, are easier to imagine as a problem that can be solved relatively quickly and with less disruption. From an advocacy point of view, it's the lower-hanging fruit.