The above was a recent comment here on the group. While I certainly don't disagree with the first sentence, I have problems with the second. Everything in life is dangerous and potentially lethal: one can die from drinking too much water; one can die from whittling a folk art Santa and slicing through the femoral artery; one can die from just getting out of bed in the morning (most heart attacks occur during the first few hours of waking). There's risk in everything we do - the difference is how safely the activity is pursued and then the statistical odds of a fatal injury occurring while performing the activity.
It may be quibbling, but every tool in the shop can kill you and many of those are much more statistically risky, injury-wise, to operate than a lathe. I would suppose lathe injuries tend to be much less severe and permanently disfiguring than injuries from table saws, jointers, band saws, routers or a number of other shop tools. In the four years I've been turning I've only seen one instance of moderately severe facial injuries from a flying piece of wood (a few years back in the AAW Journal). I've seen, read and heard of nicks to the chins, friction burn injuries to the hands, bruised and blackened fingernails, a bruised temple (from getting smacked by a tool handle after the operator tried peering into a hollow form while the lathe was running and tool still working inside) and plethora of cuts, nicks and scrapes to the fingers. Every one of these injuries, including the facial bruising in the Journal picture, would heal within a week or two. Other shop tools remove fingers permanently. When was the last time the injury with a table saw, jointer or band saw you were told about resulted in only bruising?
On the whole, deaths from woodshop injuries, I would suppose, are statistically pretty low on the totem pole. When was the last time you heard about someone being killed using any woodworking tool much less while operating a lathe? I object to the alarmist scare tactic in the quoted post. I especially object to the notion that operating a lathe carries greater risk of death than other shop tools.
(BTW, I started my daughter out, guiding her hands while turning tops, last year when she was six.)