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In small town America, 100% of adult cyclists have car licenses. What you're observing is that most people are 'suicidal, law-breaking, moving hazards'.
Only in the case of cyclists, they can't use this 'stupidity' to kill a dozen people with simple twist of their arms.
Weird that many of these people's neighbors can successfully own a cache of firearms for their entire adult life without brandishing it against themselves or another innocent human. Only target dummies, deer, and turkey need be afraid of these allegedly "suicidal, law-breaking, moving hazards."
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I don’t think this is true, and let me give an analogy. I have been several times to a sportsmen’s show in a small city, with classes, vendors hawking their wares, guides pitching services, that kind of thing. The level of firearm proficiency among attendees is pretty high, and the level of firearms safety is very high. At an event like this, you could pull random people out of the crowd on a busy show floor and hand them loaded rifles without causing me any concern at all. Obviously there was no reason to do this and no one did it, but the odds of an incident would be low.
One year there was a booth selling stun guns, and people did some pretty irresponsible things with them – things they would never have done with firearms. The people were the same, but their behavior was very different. To everyone there guns were serious and required respect, but to many stun guns were toys, and they treated them like toys.
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The US has a high rate of vehicular deaths but it isn’t that high. I wonder how motorcyclists and cyclists stack up in deaths per road mile traveled? Assuming similar behavior you’d think motorcyclists die at a higher rate because of higher speed.
Motorcycle deaths per 100 million VMT is far higher than cars -- about 26.2, compared to 1.20 for passenger cars. This is probably largely because a motorcycle provides almost no protection to the occupant in a crash (though behavior probably also plays a role). Cyclist fatalities per mile aren't really known because miles traveled isn't really known.
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