this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Oh man, this is wrong.
In. 2022, there were 500k plumbers in the US, I don't have exact numbers for how many pipe fitters there were, but it's a position that's always in high demand, safe to say that very few of that 500k number are pipe fitters, less than a quarter. So let's say 100k pipe fitters which is honestly, probably generous.
There were 70 fatal accidents involving pipe fitters. Not injuries, fatal accidents only. That is a ratio of .0006.
The US military boasted 1.3 million members that year, and 270 fatal accidents, and 0 to enemy action. A ratio of .0002.
You are 2/3rd less likely to die in the armed forces then you are pipe fitting.
That's interesting, but it would be perhaps more interesting to compare the yearly average accross a longer time frame. Also didn't a bunch of people get lung cancer and die as a result of burn pits? I'm sure people died years later from exposure to other hazards too, not to mention how many people commit suicide after.
Also this isn't to say pipe fitting isn't a dangerous job, I am just interested how the statistics would look over a longer time frame and with consideration of deaths that occur after service, but still as a result.
So there's a few things happening here that are causing industrial numbers to surpass American military rates of injury.
We are not actively in conflict with any other nation, so being in the military is no more dangerous than any industrial occupation because of conflict.
The military is, generally, safer than any one occupation, but the military is also a monolith. Saying it's safer in the military is kind of like saying office jobs in the US are more dangerous than pipe fitting. You're essentially comparing numerous disparate positions to one type of work, and that skews your results. It would be more accurate to compare rates of incidents in say, front line infantrymen to any particular other field.
It's also worth pointing out that the military has it's own plumbers, and they do their own pipe fitting. Statistics on the rates of injury there are a little harder to come by.
But more to the specific points you mentioned: yes, and that's not the first time the military has accidently killed or seriously injured it's own people. These incidents happen in civilian world too and arguably, more frequently. The US industrial labor pool is 10 times the size of the military, and negligent safety hazards come up every year. Rates of suicide are also lower in the military than in the general population, and a variety of factors contribute to that.
First of all, KIA MIA for 2022 is 0, I did add them.
People who later die due to injury is also included, for both metrics. That's why these numbers are almost 2 years old.
What specifically was excluded were those who died to illness or self inflicted wounds.
I picked the most recent year for which information is available, I gathered the summary information from statistics that others had already done.
These reports are prepared yearly, I'm not sure what you expect. It's literally how statistics are done. It's an industrial standard. Do you expect that people only work for 1 year out of their lives while everyone in the military is stuck there for 8?
I dunno man it sounds like you're just being dense on purpose because you've run out of room to argue.