Numbers of deaths
This has been sitting around in my to-post file for months; a conversation on a mailing list reminded me to finally post it. Some miscellaneous statistics, a la the "Harper's Index" (that is, these items have no particular clear connection among them, but the numbers are interesting to compare as if they're in some way comparable):
In 1999, according to the DOT's Fatality Analysis Reporting System Web-Based Encyclopedia, 41,611 people died in "motor vehicle crashes" in the US (drivers, passengers, pedestrians, cyclists, etc). There were, btw, 6.3 million crashes total—two-thirds of those were property-damage only. Anyway, so call it an average of 110 a day, or 1 person dying in a car crash every 13 minutes.
The Times ran a map back in September, showing the number of people from each of nearly 50 countries who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.
A couple of early commentators on Sept. 11 said that more people had died in the attacks than in the entire Vietnam war. The only even potentially true part of that is the notion that more American civilians died in the attacks than in Vietnam (which I'm guessing is true but I don't know). Britannica notes that in addition to the military deaths on all sides in Vietnam, over a million Vietnamese civilians were killed. (That includes people killed by all the various factions, of course, not just by Americans, and the deaths took place over the course of about ten years, so that's an average of a hundred thousand Vietnamese civilians killed each year.)
The British and American firebombing of Dresden in 1943 resulted in somewhere between 25K and 250K civilians killed, depending on who you believe. (Some sources indicate that it's now widely believed that the Nazis inflated the death figures from Dresden by adding a 0 to the end of every number.) Turns out (I didn't know this 'til recently) that British and Canadian bombers firebombed Hamburg in 1943 (a little before Dresden). Several days of bombing, resulting in about 40,000 people killed. Various sources, including Britannica, indicate that the objective in Allied bombing of European cities was to destroy civilians' homes and thereby affect morale and willingness to continue the war. Some sources indicate that when Allied civilians heard about the tactic, they weren't very happy with it, so it may've reduced the American willingness to continue the war as well, dunno.
The firebombing of Tokyo resulted in over 80,000 deaths, according to Britannica and various online sources.
I don't have statistics on civilian casualties in Iraq (where we were bombing again a year or two back iIrc, without a war going on) or Yugoslavia.
The above are not, of course, meant to justify anyone's attack on anything; just to give an idea of relative numbers, because once you start talking about thousands of deaths, I quickly lose all perspective on which numbers are bigger than which other numbers and by how much.
I also find it interesting that my notions about the undesirability of killing civilians during military engagements don't seem to have much grounding in fact. I always thought it was weird that there would be rules to warfare, that it would be acceptable to kill military people but not civilian people, but enough people told me that was true that I eventually accepted it. But it seems there's been a lot of that killing-of-civilians stuff going around.