Hacker News Reader

> United States is so rare that a child would have to be outside unsupervised for, on average, 750,000 years before being snatched by a stranger.

Is this stat from 1980s or recent? If recent, what may be the likelihood that such stats are the outcome of parents' paranoia?

View on HN

There are 300 kid abductions per year in the US, more or less the same amount of people who got struck by lightning or the same about of kids who drown in swimming pool. I don't see any hysteria around two of these topics though

Is that 300 kid abductions by strangers? Because just based on the amber alerts that I get where the police suspect a parent that number can not possibly be correct if not.

> Is that 300 kid abductions by strangers?

Correct. The number of abductions of children by their parents is three orders of magnitude higher.

I mean I certainly see a lot of talk about swimming pools being extremely dangerous for kids.

Gun ownership advocates in particular love to bring up the stat that it's more dangerous for a household with kids to have a swimming pool than a gun.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com