It's about mitigation too. It's a classic problem. Let's say you have a guy like Ted Bundy, hypothetically, and you have this huge manhunt and you catch him a few days after his first attack. OK, now you look at the cold, hard numbers and you see that you've spent an enormous amount of effort catching a guy who's only killed a few people. On paper that might look crazy. But in the case of the real Ted Bundy he killed over 30 people across 7 states in 4 years. And if he had never been caught he hypothetically could have killed hundreds.

This is why naive numbers comparisons are just stupid.

Edit: Here's another example I came up with. To date only about 120,000 people have been killed by nuclear weapons. Which is a tiny fraction of the people killed by conventional weapons, or even heart disease. By naive logic we shouldn't worry about nuclear weapons, we should worry far more about heart disease, and strategic arms limitation talks should concentrate on the far more lethal conventional weapons.

this is certainly the most intelligent arguement to RMS' case.

But try to tell a bunch of tone-deaf nerds that, if you can get a word in edge-wise between their ranting about how many people are killed by automobiles each year.