[user104658]

Originally Posted by Niamh.

5000 to 1 though, I think I'd have to seriously consider picking up the gun, if the person started begging me not to though I couldn't

Yeah that's the thing that essentially makes it impossible for most people. The 5000 people is just a number, it's not even a significant number in terms of how many people die every day across the world anyway, but that one in front of you... You can see the fear in their eyes, you can see them crying, and for most people (unless they have an empathy disorder) it becomes near impossible to pull the trigger.

Its sort of a thought experiment that explains the callous actions of politicians. E.g. There are VERY few politicians - even tories - who would sit in a family's living room and decide to take money they need to survive away from them, with the kids sat there scared. But you can bet your arse they'll sign their name to a policy that does exactly the same thing.

Or another example, US healthcare... Take a multi-millionaire politician to one young person who needs treatment for cancer and many of them will be compelled to pay for it themselves. And yet, show them a sheet of statistics about how many thousands of young people in America die because of poor health coverage, and they'll shrug it right off.

My genuine belief is that because human psychology developed in relatively small tribal units, we're just not physically able to think of vast numbers of people as individuals, without actively making the effort to "ponder it out".we have to use higher reasoning to do it, our more instinctual base thought processes just treat it like junk data.