All Intensive Purposes

This sentence seems to capture something ineffable about Malcolm Gladwell's writing (which I often like very much):

If you look, in fact, at emergency room statistics, you'll see that more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites -- which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry as much about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end.

I have no reason to question Gladwell's characterization of emergency-room statistics, but the second half of the sentence, though cute, certainly does not follow from the first.