Ever wonder how many people win a million dollar or more lottery ticket per year? I did. I tried to figure out that information. Turns out, you have to dig for it. Luckily, Dan Ma has an introductory to statistics blog and several years ago, he did a little research. Dan looked into state lottery winners in California and Iowa. For California, it is an average of about 10 winners per year of a million or more dollars. For Iowa, an average of 4.4 winners per year of a million or more dollars. You can see his work here.
Using these two states, we can make some guesstimates about the average number of state lottery winners per year, whose winnings were a million dollars or more. California, Texas, Florida, and New York represent the largest populous states, representing about 33 percent of the population of the United States. Since California had an average of 10 per year, conservatively, we’ll say that all four of those states had an average of 10 per year, totalling 40 per year. Next, the other 46 states, we’ll conservatively estimate an average of 5 a year. This total would 46 * 5 and is 230. Thus 230 + 40 will be 270. There are a couple of multi-state lotteries. I’m going to assume they are not counted in these statistics and say they are about 30 winners per year, for a total of 300.
Statista has the number of justifiable homicides from the years 2007 through 2022 here. An average number per year by private citizens is around 338. In short, on average each year, there are approximately as many million dollar lottery winners as there are justified homicides by private citizens. However, there are way more defensive gun uses. According to the National Firearm Survey, there are an estimated 1.67 million defensive gun uses per year. 82 percent of the time, the firearm is not discharged for around 1.37 million. About 1.32 million of those occurred in the home or on the property of the home (79 percent).
These statistics, at least to me, indicate we should be spending much less time focusing in on justified homicides by private citizens and more time thinking about home and property security as well as simpler firearms for defense of your home and property.