My shop teacher seemed to think the band saw was more dangerous than the table saw. Was he wrong, or is it just that table saws are used so much more than band saws that they dominate the injuries?
Here's a saw stop in action, so it's not gory. But look at how FAST things go wrong here and how violent the interaction was.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/comments/11s53ew/w...
Compare that to a band saw in use, and you can see fingers quite close to the to the cutting edge and still have good control over the work.
I use a table saw quite a bit and think there are more ways things can go wrong, most of which stem from kickback which happens in a split second. The wood will either fly back and hit you, or your hand will be pulled into the blade and you will likely lose a finger.
Both machines can be safe with the proper precautions. That said, I still enjoy my SawStop as insurance for my fingers since I still write software for my day job.
One of the more horrifying things I've witnessed second-hand with kickback was a lucky third scenario. It was high school woodshop and one morning the teacher pulls us all over to the miter saw bench and points at a huge chunk that's missing from it. The bench surface was two or three layers of MDF glued and screwed together. He explained that someone had been cutting something on the table saw 8 feet away from it, had a kickback, the kickback missed but the piece of wood shot into the miter bench and that was the result. Thinking about what that same piece of wood would have done if it had hit a human... yeesh, I definitely treated kickback with a lot more respect after that day.
I'd say overall a tablesaw is more dangerous compared to a band saw because it has the additional failure mode of kickback which happens occasionally even to very experienced operators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuWNEAlC2-0
Not something a band saw will do. So a band saw will just cut you while the table saw will cut you but also hurl material at you.