Linus wrote:Matt Liebman actually is making a decent point here, although he definitely could've gone about it better. I'm speaking mainly from a US perspective, so bear that in mind, but the amount of fear-mongering and over-focus on terrorism as a threat is disproportional to the actual size of the problem. That's not to say it isn't a problem or that no one should care about it, of course, I'm just saying it often gets way over-hyped. A better comparison would be to people murdered by terrorists versus people killed in "regular" murders. The latter vastly outweighs the former, especially here in the US where we have something like 15k+ murders per year.
I can't remember which wag it was who put it this way, but the counter-argument to this whole line of thought is: "Sure, more people are killed by malfunctioning toasters every year than are killed by terrorists,
but there's no organization running around trying to mis-wire toasters."
A terrorist threat, regardless of numbers, is a qualitatively different kind of thing from accidents and acts of God, but it's also qualitatively different even from things like murder (there is no unified organization with political aims that's behind all the murders that are happening).
Again, because we're talking about a group of people with aims and objectives who are trying to achieve those aims and objectives by means of terrorism, a) it's actually more amenable to solution than a diffuse threat like murder, it's a relatively informationally/causally less complex thing that government
can actually "do something" about, and b) if it's unchecked, it's going to escalate, till eventually the numbers
do really start to matter, and c) it's an avoidable problem, particularly in the case of Islamic terrorism coming from foreigners, because there's no reason for those people to be in the country in the first place, it's just an extra problem that nobody needs.
There's also the not inconsiderable moral/emotional argument: it's an insult to a free people and their political constitution, their way of life, etc.