I think you completely took my post out of context. I never stated a thing about whether anyone should engage in any activity. Storm chasing is inherrently risky, NASCAR is inherrently risky, skydiving is inherrently risky, mountain/rock climbing is inherrently risky, dirt bike motocross is inherrently risky. Now, take the number of participants in a given segment for each tasks, and ratio that number with the number of injuries or fatalities. Now bring the participants to an equal number and scale the number of incidents equally. Which out of any of those will have the fewest number of injuries/fatalities?
Except that storm chasing truthfully
is more heavily regulated by the government than any of these outside of perhaps skydiving.
NASCAR, motocross, rock climbing - these are very largely self-regulated by corporate organizations or sport-specific associations, with only a few actual municipal laws applied directly toward them. There aren't even very many governmental regulations when it comes to spectator safety - read the fine print on any professional sports event ticket to see how little you are actually protected by law as a spectator. Skydiving is special because they use air and anything that uses air is subject to the FAA; but in a sense, storm chasing is exactly like that. The entire "hobby" consists of driving on surface roads, an activity which is already entirely subject to very strict state and local regulation - contrary to some chaser's demonstrated behavior, there are stated limits to speed, lane use, vehicle attitude and safety, and so forth, which no other law absolves chasers from following just because they're "chasing". Indeed, if storm chasing is ever directly legislated against, it would most likely be in the form of additions to the traffic code rather than new stand-alone laws.
Another problem we have is, storm chasers don't report accidents/fatalities the same way other outdoor activities are reported. When someone dies or is injured at say a motocross event, everybody knows about it because so many people are watching. They are reported to the governing professional/amateur sport association and media outlets who report on the events and participants, and the numbers are made public.
But who reports storm chasing injuries? To whom are they reported as such? The fatalities of last week were reported because the chasers were so famous even outside their field - but let's be pragmatic: if you or I are found in our rolled vehicle, that will likely be reported as a storm fatality, not a storm chasing fatality. If you or I get a blown out window that cuts us up, or we get rolled but not killed, that won't be reported as anything because there's nobody to report to - we go to the hospital, and that's it. We call the insurance company, and report "storm damage", and that's it. We get stuck in the mud or get a flat tire - once we're pulled out or change that tire, as far as the world is concerned it never happened.
And that's not even all of it. On this site not long ago somebody posted a video from a few years back where a chaser en route to intercept some storm activity had his car completely totaled by debris from a passing truck which was unrelated to the storm he was on the way to. Do we call that a chasing accident? He was in his car, driving, on the way toward storm activity. As a chaser, he would've remained in that car, still driving, with no tangible, recognizable transition - but where does "on the way to the chase" end and "the chase" begin? A certain proximity? A certain time? Some other condition? In order to avoid adding to "the danger of chasing", we can fudge that line in either direction to best suit our biases.
I don't think it's actually fair to make so many declarations about the safety of storm chasing, whose various incidents and accidents are never actually reported to some central body that keeps track, compared to other regulated activities wherein every slight incident is recorded and tallied up.
