The terrorists succeed again

The announcement today that draconian new security measures are being imposed on airline travellers in Great Britain following the arrests of several suspected terrorists is proof that the terrorists are indeed succeeding: They want to terrify people, and the people are obliging them by being terrified.

How many people have you known who have been killed or injured by a terrorist attack? I don’t know a single one. How many people have you known who have been killed or injured in an authomobile accident? I know several.

The fact is that while terrorism is a dreadful fact of modern life, the likelihood that you or a member of your family will be killed in a terrorist act is vanishingly small compared to the probabilities that death will come from some other cause. Cory Doctorow points us to an article in the Fall 2004 issue of the journal Regulation, in which John Mueller of Ohio State University compares the risks of terrorism to other risks that we accept without reservation [PDF]:

For all the attention it evokes, terrorism actually causes rather little damage and the likelihood that any individual will become a victim in most places is microscopic. Those adept at hyperbole like to proclaim that we live in “the age of terror.” However, while obviously deeply tragic for those directly involved, the number of people worldwide who die as a result of international terrorism is generally only a few hundred a year, tiny compared to the numbers who die in most civil wars or from automobile accidents. In fact, in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.

Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping 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 September 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.

…

[T]here is at present a great and understandable concern about what would happen if terrorists were to shoot down an American airliner or two, perhaps with shoulder-fired missiles. Obviously, that would be a major tragedy. But the ensuing public reaction to it, many fear, could come close to destroying the industry. Accordingly, it would seem to be reasonable for those in charge of our safety to inform the public about how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns out that someone has made that calculation: University of Michigan transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, in an article last year in American Scientist, wrote that they determined there would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, they calculate that an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America’s safest roads — rural interstate highways — one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles.

Read the entire article [PDF] for more common-sense discussion of terrorism in context.

Will our political leaders suddenly be seized with a severe attack of rationalism and start explaining the real dangers of terrorism—like a political system that caters to, promotes, and exploits unreasoning fear? Not bloody likely. A reasonable, informed view of terrorism is something the American people will have to come to by themselves, if they ever do. In the meantime, John Mueller has some useful advice:

Frantz Fanon, the 20th century revolutionary, contended that “the aim of terrorism is to terrify.” If that is so, terrorists can be defeated simply by not becoming terrified — that is, anything that enhances fear effectively gives in to them… What we need is more pronouncements like the one in a recent book by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): “Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed by a terrorist! It’s still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave. Suck it up, for crying out loud. You’re almost certainly going to be okay. And in the unlikely event you’re not, do you really want to spend your last days cowering behind plastic sheets and duct tape? That’s not a life worth living, is it?”

UPDATE 08/11/06 11:32 AM: Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex points us to a possible neurobiological explanation for the irrational fear of terrorism.