Is murder and other violent crime overhyped in our society?

So honestly, looking at the most recent national statistics I can find, America had 16,204 murders in 2009 which is 0.042802 murders per 1,000 people. Obviously each individual murder is horrific for those personally impacted, but to be perfectly honest, murder only claims the lives .00004% of Americans. And furthermore, I don't have specific data, but if we can be real about this, we know more than half of those deaths were people who were into some foul ? to begin with, so for people who don't go around looking for trouble, the odds are really insanely low.

To give you a comparison, about 40,000 Americans die in car accidents per year. That more than twice the number of murders. But while people ? their pants about going anywhere near a "dangerous neighborhood" when was the last time you heard anyone say "I'm staying away from that major intersection!"?

Now I know someone is gonna say that it's a different story if you're from the hood, cause violent crime is ending the lives of inner city minorities at a much higher rate. That's a fair point. But guess what else is killing inner city minorities at a disproportionately high rate? Heart disease, the number 1 killer in America. Heart disease kills more than 600,000 Americans annually ( more than 37 times the number of murders!) and due to the lack of healthy diet options in many inner city neighborhoods, you can bet that number is skewed for inner city minorities. But how often do we hear about city councilmen from the hood taking a bold stand against pork rinds?

You don't hear about that ? , cause they're too busy drumming up publicity for themselves by acting like murder is the end all be all of inner city problems.

Let's just be real. Getting murdered would be awful, but violent crime isn't as big of a problem as our politicians and media make it out to be.