My dad was right

I've always been a hypochondriac. When I was a kid, you name it, I was scared of it - ebola, cholera, tetanus, electrocution, serial killers, nuclear war. But my dad would always say: "Don't be afraid of that. Be afraid of being hit by a car." Since then, true to his advice, cars have been the only thing that have come close to killing me.

Now here's a little statistic I read today: 1 in 247 Americans will die in a car accident.

Doesn't that seem wrong? Shouldn't we be able to sacrifice something a little less valuable than 0.4% of our population for the freedom to drive around? If we had, say, better enforcement of our speed limit laws, wouldn't that be an acceptable intrusion of government into our lives, if it managed to save 10,000 or so people a year?

UPDATE: Actually, as astute commenter chris pointed out, the number given is not actually the percentage of Americans who die from car accidents.The actual number is about 42,000 per year (as of 2005). The total increase in population from July 2004 to July 2005 was about 2.7 million. Thus, over the long term, we are actually losing about 1.5% of our population to car deaths, not 0.4% as I stated before.