2005.07.15
Who’s Afraid of the Terrorists?
(Please note: this article was originally published here)
Not me. Or at least, I’m not so much afraid of them as I am the obviously insane homeless guy down the street brandishing a stick. I’m more afraid of someone weaving back and forth between lanes on the highway because I know I’m in control of my car, but that guy looks either drunk or stupid (and yes, probably both).
I feel more anxiety from doctors and dentists than from terrorists. I know it’s irrational but let’s face it, how often do you have to go in to see the terrorist? Sharks scare the living hell out of me and I suffered nightmares about them for years and years after seeing Jaws as an impressionable 12 year old yet I still surf.
Most of the sites I found (ex: Foreign Policy) give you a 1 in 88,000 odds of dying in a terrorist related activity. I’m assuming that is in your lifetime, not per day. One site even says you have a, “1 in 55,000,000 in a terrorist-caused plane disaster assuming one such incident a month and you fly once a month.” That sounds pretty slim. Compare this to a 2002 survey compiled by the National Safety Council on your odds of dying from various common occurances. These are odds of dying in your lifetime by:
Motorcycle: 1 in 1,159
Animal rider or occupant of animal-drawn vehicle: 1 in 31,568
Drowning in a bathtub: 1 in 10,582
Contact with sharp instrument: 1 in 35,476
Lightning: 1 in 56,439
Alcohol: 1 in 10,493
Assault with a firearm: 1 in 315
Legal execution: 1 in 55,597
Contact with hot tap water: 1 in 93,125
Essentially you have a better chance of dying from any of these things except contact with hot tap water (which is scary close versus terrorism) then you do from terrorist related activity. You have a better chance of being legally executed (meaning found guilty in a Court and sentenced to death) than you do of al-Quaeda coming to town and ruining your day.
Given these statistics, why the freaking hell can’t I take a stupid lighter on the airplane? Why do we have stupid orange alerts? Why are we fighting and dying in Iraq in “The War on Terror”? Why is the media lapping it all up? Why are our leaders obsessed with the subject? I’m not saying we should abandon finding and prosecuting terrorists, especially the One That Got Away (bin Laden, who Bush seems to have forgotten about), but maybe we could spend a few less billions of dollars on it and do something better with the money, like stop the national deficit/debt growth, or money to VA Hospitals, or vital national infrastructure, or even putting an American on Mars.
Emotionally it’s far more dramatic to think about dying in a crazy terrorist attack on San Francisco, but the truth is you’re more likely to contract cancer. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
The real terror to me is the fact that we’re made to feel afraid of something that has less of a chance of killing me in my lifetime than accidental poisoning (1 in 1,117) or falling off my bed (1 in 4,745). Well, I won’t be afraid, and I hope all of you out there won’t be, either.
4 Comments Categorized: thoughts
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4 Responses to “Who’s Afraid of the Terrorists?”
- douglas.nerad » Terrorism and Statistics says (August 11th, 2006 at 00:51:48 )
[...] Being on vacation and all I failed until today to hear about a foiled terrorist attempt to blow up several planes using liquified explosives and an iPod. I’m happy they caught people who would do these terrible things but it still reminds me of an article I wrote over a year ago that shows you have a significantly better chance of dying in your bathtub or by lightning than you do by the hands of a terrorist. You can find that article here (reprinted here). [...]
- douglas says (September 18th, 2006 at 00:18:34 )
A year after the fact there’s now a book about this very topic of your chances of dying from a terrorist attack as opposed to other means. I know I won’t get any credit for this, so it’s at least nice to see it’s getting some more attention. Not that it will change many people’s views on terrorism… but I can hope.
- douglas.nerad » Newspaper Statistics says (October 1st, 2006 at 19:26:31 )
[...] Thinking about my last post on the odds of dying in a terrorist attack, I started thinking about how the media harps on and on about things like shark attacks or school shootings than they do about people contracting diabetes or dying from alcohol and/or drug abuse. I know that things like this are not good stories. “Man diagnosed with cancer, news at 10.” Yet this is what is news: information that gives you a clear idea of what is going on in the world. Yet the media needs drama to drive sales. The more outlandish the story, the greater the human interest, the better the income. OK, who am I to deny that? [...]
- douglas.nerad » Answering the Challenge says (October 1st, 2006 at 22:15:09 )
[...] “Political” Posts: 1: Open Source Voting Machines. Here I rant and rave about the ludicrous state of electronic voting and defend the proposition that open source voting machines are our best bet for fair and incorruptible electronic voting system. 2: Devising Four Pillars for the Future. This is quite a long entry dealing with establishing a simple message for the masses from the liberal POV. It’s a job that has yet to be completed to satisfaction. 3: Once Upon a Time in America. This article is an introduction to a series I started and haven’t touched in a long time. They are all about values as they should be, not as people too often think they are today. I feel it’s time we took back our values instead of letting some politicians and religious wingnuts dictate what they should be to us. 4: Who’s Afraid of the Terrorists and Newspaper Statistics. Two articles that are very closely related concerning statistics and their usage in main stream media. 5: Who’s Afraid of the Dominionist? In this post I point out who is, for me, the scariest group in modern politics. Read it; I’m sure you’ll agree. [...]
