A false sense of insecurity

[mdlbear]

Boing Boing: Only traitors try to make us afraid of terrorists

In this mind-blowing, exhaustively researched Cato institute paper by Ohio State University's John Mueller, the case against being afraid of terrorism is laid out in irrefutable logic, backed with credible, documented statistics about terrorism's risks. From the number of fatalities produced by terrorism to the trends in terrorism death to the fact that almost no one has ever died from a military biological agent to the fact that poison gas and dirty bombs in the field do only minor damage -- this paper is the most reassuring and infuriating piece of analysis I've read since September 11th, 2001.

The bottom line is, terrorism doesn't kill many people. Even in Israel, you're four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.

(PDF link)

This is something I've been saying for a long time. You're much more likely to be killed in a drive-by shooting than in a terrorist attack.

Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any group- ing of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the Sep- tember 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

And, let's face it, folks: nobody is going to hijack a plane and fly it into a building, ever again. Even unarmed, a planeful of enraged passengers is going to be more than a match for a handful of terrorists. The only thing gained by the "increased" airport security is to make people think the politicians are doing something about the terrorist threat, and to make that threat seem greater than it actually is. Their reasons for doing this are left as an exercise for the reader.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I get the impression that many people consider one death from terrorism to be worse than a hundred deaths from other causes. It doesn't make sense to me.