| A person residing in the US has a higher chance of being struck by lightning than being killed by a foreign terrorist. (Or dying from Ebola.) |
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Source: struckbylightning.org If it is irrational and absurd to agonize about being struck by lightning (and I think most of us can agree that it is) then it is even more irrational and absurd to agonize about being killed by a foreign terrorist on American soil. (Or to die from Ebola.) These irrational and absurd fears are the product of a media industry ginned up for the purpose of selling newspapers, or its modern equivalent. If you want to live a long healthy life, do these two things:
In the years after 2001, an average of fewer than nine Americans per year have been killed in terror attacks on American soil, compared, for example, with an average of about 12,000 a year who are shot to death in non-terror related incidents. President Barack Obama was ridiculed for noting (correctly) that more Americans die each year falling in the bathtub than from terrorism. The fact that Americans are 1,333 times more likely to be shot dead by a criminal than killed by a terrorist has not persuaded Congress to take the former nearly as seriously as the latter. And while every lethal “jihadist” attack in the United States since 9/11 has been conducted by a citizen or permanent resident, elected officials continue to stress the threat posed by those who come from abroad. Source: "How Our Strategy Against Terrorism Gave Us Trump" By JON FINER and ROBERT MALLEY -- NY Times - MARCH 4, 2017 Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post in July: “Americans have accepted an unprecedented expansion of government powers and invasions of their privacy to prevent such attacks. Since 9/11, 74 people have been killed in the United States by terrorists, according to the think tank New America. In that same period, more than 150,000 Americans have been killed in gun homicides, and we have done … nothing.” Source: "Police Abuse Is a Form of Terror" by Charles M. Blow - NY Times - 8/12/2015 Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center. Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period. “Law enforcement agencies around the country have told us the threat from Muslim extremists is not as great as the threat from right-wing extremists,” said Dr. Kurzman “There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown,” [John G. Horgan, who studies terrorism at the University of Massachusetts Lowell] said. “And there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.” Source: "Homegrown Radicals More Deadly Than Jihadis in U.S." By SCOTT SHANE - NY Times - JUNE 24, 2015 [T]errorism of all forms has accounted for a tiny proportion of violence in America. There have been more than 215,000 murders in the United States since 9/11. For every person killed by Muslim extremists, there have been 4,300 homicides from other threats. Despite public anxiety about extremists inspired by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, the number of violent plots by such individuals has remained very low. Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years. In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012. Source: "The Other Terror Threat" By CHARLES KURZMAN and DAVID SCHANZER - NY TIMES - JUNE 16, 2015 Looking at terrorism over the last 40 years — a period that includes not only the 9/11 attacks but also the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City — an American’s chance of perishing at the hands of a terrorist in the United States are one in 4 million per year. For the period since 2001, the chances are one in 110 million. By contrast, the yearly chances an American will die from an automobile accident are one in 8,200, from a homicide one in 22,000, and from drowning in a bathtub one in 950,000. Source: "Immense Fear Over a Limited Threat to Americans" - NY Times - 12/15/15 - John Mueller is a professor of political science at Ohio State University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Mark Stewart is a professor of civil engineering at the University of Newcastle in Australia. They are authors of "Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism." Even as these mass shootings have grown more frequent and loom large in our consciousness, they are a tiny fraction of America's gun violence and remain relatively rare. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others. Or that a late-night shooting on a street in Savannah, Ga., yesterday that injured three and killed one is in the same category as the madness that just played out in Southern California. [A]s threat assessment expert Dewey Cornell [a University of Virginia professor who studies school safety] points out, the risk of an active shooter attacking a school, statistically speaking, is beyond remote: "Any given school can expect to experience a student homicide about once every 6,000 years." Or as another school safety expert explained: Of America's 55 million school kids, about 20 suffer violent deaths on school grounds each year—a 1 in 2.5 million chance. Moreover, there are plenty of Americans who buy the argument that arming more "good guys" is the solution to mass shootings... If anything, overstating how often these terrifying events happen may actually help the NRA and their hard-line supporters argue for more heat-packing vigilantes. Meanwhile, it's not as if many Americans need convincing that gun massacres are taking place too often. Source: "No, There Has Not Been a Mass Shooting Every Day This Year -- This inflated stat all over the media isn't just misleading—it's stirring undue fear." - By Mark Follman - Mother Jones - Dec. 18, 2015 According to Amnesty International, at least 540 people in the United States died after being shocked with Tasers from 2001 through 2012. Source: "Doubling Down on Force With Tasers Makes Police Problems Worse" By Alison Flowers, Truthout (www.truth-out.org) - 05 January 2016 A CNN poll {in December 2015} found that 45 percent of Americans were somewhat or very worried that they or someone in their family would become a victim of terrorism. Source: "In the Apple Case, a Debate Over Data Hits Home" By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, DAVID E. SANGER and KATIE BENNER - NY Times - MARCH 13, 2016 Last year Americans were less likely to be killed by a Muslim terrorist (odds of one in six million) than for being Muslim (odds of one in one million), according to Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina. Source: "On a Portland Train, the Battlefield of American Values" by Nicholas Kristof - NY Times - 5/30/2017 |
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| Comments | Contributor | Date Submitted |
| Unless they decide to draw a cartoon of Mohammed... | Linda Denton |
5/6/2015 |
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