Lightning fatalities are not distributed the way intuition suggests. The pattern is specific enough to act on.
Around 90 percent of deaths happen outdoors, and 64 percent occur during leisure activity rather than work. The single largest leisure category is fishing. Beach and water-related activity accounts for a comparable share, camping and tent use less, and golf less still despite being the activity most associated with lightning in popular imagination.
What links the top categories is not exposure to storms but distance from shelter. Fishing and open-water activity put people somewhere it takes a long time to leave, often in a small boat, often reluctant to abandon a spot. Golf courses have shelters and carts. The risk is not the activity itself, it is the time between deciding to leave and actually being inside something.
The scale is worth holding alongside this. The US sees roughly 25,000,000 cloud-to-ground flashes a year against a 10-year average of 19 deaths, down from a 30-year average of 43. Being struck is survivable in about 90 percent of cases.
So the practical reading is not that lightning is unusually dangerous, but that the deaths concentrate in a narrow, predictable situation: outdoors, at leisure, far from a fully enclosed building or a hard-topped vehicle.
Figures from a US lightning safety reference compiled from NOAA, NWS and Vaisala data.
Strike distance calculator: lightning-distance, a dependency-free implementation of the flash-to-bang calculation described above.