Reading an academic article yesterday, I came across an interesting statistic that I hadn’t thought about before: 4 of our 43 presidents have been assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy), a rate of almost ten percent. And it turns out that fifteen presidents have been the subject of assassination attempts.

So just how dangerous is being president relative to other jobs in the US? According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data (PDF), the occupations with the highest death rates in 2004 were logging
workers and aircraft pilots/flight engineers, with a death rate of 92.4 per
100,000. That means that their risk of death is approximately .1% per year.

If we set aside all presidential deaths due to natural causes, four presidents have been killed in 217 years of US history, which is an assassination rate of approximately 2% per year. That means being president is twenty times more dangerous than the most dangerous occupations in 2004.

Maybe it’s time we give the president a raise.

(Note: Some may say that presidents are safer in the post-Kennedy era, but Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush all survived close calls during the last 35 years, so it’s hard to know whether things have really improved.)

Update 7/11 11:30 AM: The error pointed out by Ben in comments has been corrected.