The Right Can't Meme

The only difference, though, is feelings. If it's famicide, you can convince yourself it doesn't affect you because your family wouldn't kill you. Coincidentally, I just read an article about Kip Kinkel the other day. His parents also didn't think he'd kill them, yet it happened. From a big picture perspective, famicide is random. But for 4 murders in a city of 50,000 people, the odds are ever in your favor that it won't be you.

And, here's the thing: Even though a city of 5 million people has 200 murders in a year (same rate of 8 per 100,000), it also will not be you, or anybody you know. (That's with assuming that the murders were distributed randomly through the population, which they are most certainly not.) It's easier to feel endangered by 200 murders, because that's a number that the human brain can process, and 5 million is much, much too large for it. Based on the odds, though, there's as much chance that somebody in your family will kill you as a big-city stranger will. And, those odds are almost nil.

(My city has a rate half that, around 4 per 100,000, and in all the decades that I've lived here, it's never been anybody I know, and only once it was a friend of a friend. The victim of a famicide, actually.)