This reminds me of the kind of talk you hear all the time about cops.....laying their lives on the line, etc. That's what you signed up for isn't it? You never hear anyone going on about lumberjacks laying their lives on the line even though they are 27 more times more likely to die on the job than workers in all other occupations combined.
[WS:] That is not exactly correct. Lumping together "all occupation" some of which have very low fatality rates conceals the fact that there are some occupational groups with higher fatality rates than lumberjacks. The occupation with highest fatality rate is fisheries and fishery workers 118.4 per 100k employed), logging workers are second (92.9 per 100k employed) http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0004.pdf (p. 13).
Likewise, lumping together all fatalities conceals fatalities due to different causes. Cops are less likely to die from falling trees, which are genuine accidents, but they are more likely to die from homicide, which is a malicious act. In fact homicide is the leading cause of job fatality among cops (41% higher that most other occupations), albeit cops are surpasses by supervisors of retail sales workers (70%) http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0004.pdf (p.14). Therefore, the line " laying their lives on the line" has some justification - there is not much that can be done to avoid job fatalities due to pure accidents, but the job fatalities due to homicide would have been avoided if it were not for the intentional acts, which seems to be a more serious type of risk than one produced by purely random chance.
Wojtek