The Caot Institute has a paper titled A False Sense of Insecurity (97KB PDF) which looks at the real risks associated with terrorism and compares them to risks encountered in everyday life.

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.

Kind of puts it all in perspective really. And for this the US has spent almost a trillion dollars on wars in Iraq & Afghanistan? Sounds like a complete waste of money to me… unless, could it really all be about oil?? ;-)

The article also makes the point that we are letting the terrorists by becoming unnecessarily worried and that our governments, particularly the US Government, are deliberately inflaming public opinion:

What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing, coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central question: “How worried should I be?” Instead, the message the nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put (or caricatured) it, “Be scared; be very, very scared — but go on with your lives.”

Or, as John Howard likes to say, “Be alert, not alarmed”. However, while this approach would be admirable, and certainly preferable to the current one, it would probably fail as the general public has an inability to understand relative risk. The article notes that an American’s odds of dying on an airline flight is around 1 in 13 million. You would get the same odds in a car, on the safest roads, after only driving 11 miles! Worth a read.

Hat tip to Bruce Schneier