Hurricane Maria Killed as Many American Citizens as 9/11 Did | Hacker News Reader

Hurricane Maria Killed as Many American Citizens as 9/11 Did

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56 pointsvinnyglennon44 comments

9/11 was tragic, but consider the damage caused by the response in the last 15 years [1]. The number of Afghani civilian deaths alone is an order of magnitude more destruction than 9/11 and it seems unlikely that even a plurality of them cared about America or really understood why they were dying.

Assuming that nobody thought to mention this or take a deep breath and think while mobilising the army is only barely plausible to me. It seems much more likely that the absolute damage done was never an issue, and hence it isn't a powerful comparison. There are so many things worse than 9/11, including even _the immediate response to_ 9/11, that the raw damage just isn't important.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...

There are always side effects to geopolitical powerplay. The lives of the "them" are never as valuable in an "Us vs Them" scenario especially when the players and their motives are complex. The modern hegemony is the same as those of the ancient world. We just have better projectile weapons.

>It seems much more likely that the absolute damage done was never an issue, and hence it isn't a powerful comparison.

The comparison is not meant to argue that one event was worse than the other, but to put into perspective how much damage has been done and and how are we addressing the damage. Why were/are we willing to indefinitely spend $50 billion a year to kill thousands of Afghani civilians, yet are unwilling to spend $50 billion over four years to repair the damage caused and be better prepared for future hurricanes.

Smoking kills 50-100 times more Americans every year than 9/11 did.

There are a few obvious reasons why the response was much less: (1) Natural disasters are more common, more expected, and less psychologically dramatic than terrorist attacks. (2) Americans intuitively view Puerto Ricans as foreigners regardless of whether they legally have US citizenship. (Due to different culture, language and religion)

Mass shootings are also psychologically dramatic but policies are still not changed in USA.

Perhaps it is useful to the policy-making folks to not change these policies? There is very few morality-based decision-making in the upper ranks of power.

Yes they are. Maryland for example has gone through several rounds of taking away peoples’ gun rights in the last decade.

In Maryland, did they actually take away any guns particularly?

No, GP is just echoing rhetoric they heard.

On April 4, 2013, the Maryland General Assembly approved legislation imposing significant new restrictions on gun ownership. The bills ban the sale of certain semi-automatic firearms that they define as assault weapons, limit magazine capacity to ten rounds, require that handgun purchasers be fingerprinted and pass a training class in order to obtain a handgun license, and bar persons who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health institution from possessing firearms. Martin O'Malley Governor at the time, signed the legislation into law on May 16, 2013.[14] Regarding ten round magazine limits for rifles purchased in Maryland, 'standard' 30 round magazines may be purchased outside Maryland and brought into the state for personal use. Those standard magazines may not be transferred, given, sold or manufactured inside Maryland.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Maryland

The GP comment is still wrong. They didn't take away firearms from anyone. Limiting sale != taking away what is already owned.

I didn’t say they took away guns, I said they took away gun rights. Restricting the kinds of guns you can buy, or ability to sell ir transfer existing proprty, is taking away part of your rights.

Meh. It's more of a clarification of rights. When the second amendment was written, firearms were quite rudimentary by today's standards. I'm curious how the conversation will turn when we have 'laser guns', hand-held railguns and other weapons in the future that we cannot even comprehend today. Will folks complain about the government taking away their rights to owning an automatic railgun? Probably. Did the writers of the second amendment mean for it to apply to massively overpowered weapons? Probably not. If you believe it did, then why aren't you complaining about the government not letting you own ICBMs?

>When the second amendment was written, firearms were quite rudimentary by today's standards.

When the first amendment was written, the press was quite rudimentary by today’s standards. TV, radio, and internet were not envisioned. Maybe the government is allowed to regulate all news that isn’t physical printed. Also, it should be able to ban automatic printing presses. The printing presses of the timer were manual, one press one page. Nowadays the printing presses can spew thousands of pages with a single press of a button.

Thomas Jefferson wanted a revolution every 20 years, but we don't string up, draw and quarter our entire government every other decade.

It isn't ridiculous to question whether eighteenth century political and cultural standards should always apply to a 21st century state. The Constitution isn't holy writ. Somehow much of the rest of the world manages to have free, democratic states without a 2nd Amendment or its thesis that a free state requires an armed and violent populace and a lack of any regulation on firearms.

> It isn't ridiculous to question whether eighteenth century political and cultural standards should always apply to a 21st century state. The Constitution isn't holy writ.

The appeal to the text and original meaning of the Constitution is not about giving deference to 18th century attitudes over 21st century ones, it’s about resolving a dispute amongst two contemporary views. If everyone agreed that the framers were out to lunch on the 2A, it would be trivial to change it. But people don’t agree that the 2A is obsolete.

If you saw the word “arms” in a contract, would you think it was limited to a particular type of gun. If someone sells just automatic weapons, are they not an “arms dealer?” Like in a contract, if both sides agreed to change the word “arms” to something narrower, they could do it. But just like a contract, where the sides don’t agree, one is entitled to have the contract enforced as written.

>But just like a contract, where the sides don’t agree, one is entitled to have the contract enforced as written.

Where in the Constitution does it say that?

Because if it doesn't, then the entitlement you're describing doesn't exist as far as it's concerned.

The Constitution is a law, and that’s how laws work. Either follow it or agree to change it. The Constitution has a whole provision explaining how to change it—that would be irrelevant if it contemplated people just ignoring it when they didn’t like the result.

One thing about how laws work, is that they only become facts on the ground, so to speak, in the interpretation.

Courts change the followed interpretation of law all the time without amending the written law.

Often the written law only gets amended when the difference between the definition on paper and the definition in common practice can no longer be bent any further, after decades of plain conflict in language.

> Courts change the followed interpretation of law all the time without amending the written law.

They should not do that either. That’s an usurpation of the legislature’s powers and an affront to democracy.

If you wanted them to stop, you'd have to change the law so as to disallow interpretation, as the law as written already codifies that the law can be critically interpreted by courts.

However I am not sure how that would even work, given the law is in language and language must be interpreted to elucidate meaning from it in the first place. Even if you fixed the first interpretation as sacrosanct, you would then have to interpret that interpretation each time.

'Arms', in the general sense, is up to and including nukes though.

Maybe. The Constitution protects the right of "people" to "keep and bear" (i.e. keep and carry) "arms." There is at least a textual basis for interpreting "arms" to exclude weapons (like nukes and attack aircraft) that are not ordinarily carried by individuals.

But note, at the time of the founding, it was perfectly legal for private citizens to own armed warships. These ships had dozens of cannons that could fire over a mile (thus sieging a city). Canons moreover could fire grapeshot, causing massive casualties to groups of people. These weapons were far more destructive than an AR-15.

There are backpack nukes specifically designed for individuals to carry, like the B-54. If your legal cutoff was 'designed for a single person to carry', they would be included as legal.

Then maybe backpack nukes are protected by the Second Amendment? The Constitution says what it says--"we don't like the result" is a reason to amend it, not ignore it. In any event, whether or not backpack nukes are "arms," AR-15's clearly are within the category denoted by the word "arms."

Can't really fault you on any of that. Also, I do appreciate that I am carping from the sidelines here as I am not living in the US, so whatever works for you. My intent is only in passing commentary, not in trying to tell people what to do. It just looks a bit risky from the outside, is all.

>Thomas Jefferson wanted a revolution every 20 years, but we don't string up, draw and quarter our entire government every other decade.

Not your own one. Jefferson did get his wish granted in some ways however. Possibly by a malignant genie with a keen sense of irony.

> Certainly, there were major logistical challenges to moving materials on an island a thousand miles away from the U.S. mainland. Yet such obstacles did not prevent the deployment of the 82nd Airborne Division across the 7,000 miles from Fort Bragg, South Carolina to Saudi Arabia in August 1990...

Ok, first off, Fort Bragg is in North Carolina.

Secondly, the 82nd Airborne Division's job was/is to be ready to deploy halfway around the world on a moments (OK, two hours) notice and I can say that we weren't ready to do much of anything once we landed in Saudi Arabia other than be "speed bumps in the sand". Also, as was seen in Haiti (I believe), it isn't such a good idea to send combat troops off on missions like this since they are war makers and not peace keepers -- bad things happen because up to that point you are trained to fight the enemy and not much else.

So, yeah, they could've had the 82nd on the ground pretty quickly but doing so wouldn't have been a very good idea unless the Cubans were invading or something.

I don't like this comparison of death toll numbers.

At the same time I think the death toll of 9/11 is unfortunately much higher as an alarmingly big number of first responders were diagnosed with cancer and many of them died already.

That's weird, they do not mention the water and food left to rot on governmental parking lots and airport runways. I guess they just completely forgot about it..

That doesn't help push the narrative that it's all Trump's fault. Do you expect them to blame the victim?

While I'm sure that in reality terrorism is rather a great political leverage than a biggest threat, it also has one specific property that HN should be familiar with: scalability. Hurricane, shooters and road/cancer deaths are not scalable, i.e. they cannot be over-produced because it's just weather, psychopathy* and other statistical accidents. Terrorism though can be scaled by orders of magnitude by pretty simple means.

* terrorists can be viewed psychopats, but let's leave that question open, since it is more military than civil.

I agree about hurricanes, but about the rest - how so? Does history record any case of terrorism scaling up? Meanwhile, both road and cancer deaths scale up directly with the growth of modern civilization - more people = more cancer deaths; more roads & cars = more car deaths.

But, same people = same cancer deaths; same roads & cars = same car deaths. You cannot increase it from outside and claim that it was your revenge.

>Does history record any case of terrorism scaling up?

Do you mean that if after first acts of terror no one would bring up a defense against it, then there would be no more acts than it is? By "first" I mean the time since our world got good enough life to see it as outstanding event -- burning village was obviously a regular thing at earlier periods.

Deaths through weather and other natural disasters can scale perfectly fine, due to the scaling up of interlinked dependencies that are then run with minimum overhead. Puerto Rico was a Wexelblat disaster, through and through.

War on Weather!

I sometimes wonder how much of an impact 9-11 would have made if the planes had killed 3000 people in poor neighborhoods in Louisiana or Alabama. Same for Maria. If it had devastated Manhattan I think there would have been much more of an effort to help.

Or if it had hit mar-a-lago

I don't disagree with the author's basic idea, but there's this other analysis of death from all causes in the case of 9/11 which puts the death toll higher.

One analyst ascribed an additional 1595 deaths to 9/11 because of increased car traffic in the year after 9/11. So, the numerical comparison does not result in such a close match.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-r...

Those deaths where not caused by 9/11, they where caused by people’s responces to 9/11. By that token the moon landing or any major event caused deaths by changing people’s behaviors, but saying the moon landing killed people seems more obviously wrong.

By comparison some people had heath issues directly caused by 9/11 and you could reasonably add those deaths to the 9/11 death toll.

the 3000 number for maria comes from taking the total death rate in puerto rico in the 6(?) months following the hurricane and subtracting the average death rate for that period in previous years. it's an nonstandard way of calculating disaster fatalities, chosen specifically because it gives a big number that is useful for relief lobbying purposes (it's like 9/11!), and if you calculated 9/11 casualties the same way you would surely come up with a significantly higher number. the number of people killed directly by the hurricane, during the course of the hurricane, was under 100.

I thought they ended up doing that because the bodies were piling up uncounted and the governor admitted that that the civilian infrastructure required to keep track of the dead had itself failed and so asked for outside help from academics on the mainland. They didn't go with the highest academic figure either.

If they were actually trying for high figures, as you suggest, why not go with the Harvard study placing it at around 4600 dead?

But why not include "people's responses" as a direct consequence of the attack itself?

Terrorists blow up a target and "people's responses" are going to be an attempt to flee the damage. Some of them will be hurt or killed doing so. Is that not ascribable to the terrorist attack itself? It seems arbitrary to exclude that.

e.g. if someone in the period before a hurricane decides not to evacuate and that person dies, we still ascribe their death to the hurricane.

The fact that people decide to rely on other, historically less safe, modes of transportation after an attack on airliners is somewhat predictable. Can we really write that additional risk off as "people's responses" and not part of the intention of the attack?

A coworker was sitting at a large conference table when a giant wall of jet fuel came through the ceiling killing half the people in the room. Fleeing the building due to fire is a response to someone hitting the building with an airplane.

Someone not flying six months later because of something they saw on TV is filtered through a long chain of other people. It’s hardly the saw thing.

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