I'd like to start giving people the option of commenting on shorter Cold Takes pieces (which I don't cross-post here or provide audio for). I'm going to use this post for that: I will generally leave a comment for each piece, and people can leave their comments as replies to that.
It feels super suspicious that the smallest possible source of violent death("Individual homicides") and the largest possible source of violent death("Mass Atrocities") would have significant contributions to the violent death rate, but the middle is excluded as insignificant.
Are there other examples like this where the smallest & largest sources of something are both significant with the middle excluded as negligible?
I didn't exclude the middle because I think it's insignificant - more because I didn't have data on it. That said, I would actually guess that it's not as big as the other two categories.
If two groups got in a fight in the US and there were lots of deaths, these would be classified as homicides; for violent deaths to not be classified as homicides, there needs to be some sort of breakdown or abuse of the legal framework. Those events don't seem so common that I think we're obviously missing a ton when we just look at the most deadly ones (though I do wish we had data on all of them).