Today in the Spokesman-Review: Dick Meyer: Media, politics exaggerate terrorism threat.
... yeah, to show up a bit late to the conversation, terrorism is generally overstated to farcical degrees outside of a few countries. There
are some places where it's a very serious, very deadly problem, but... the US isn't one of them. More likely to die by lightning, iirc, or a whole host of other things. Our non-terrorism related gun deaths were roughly on par with the
entire world's terrorism-related deaths a year or two ago, for an example of something that approaches an actual problem.* No clue if it's still around that level, but... yeah. Yeah. And non-death related damages can't really compare -- I wouldn't be surprised if kitchen fires have managed a higher average (or at least median -- the 9/11 stuff and maybe some of the bombings would probably through the average off) of material damage to our country over the last few decades.** Probably not total cost (because the amount spent on this stuff is several orders of magnitude over the direct damages), but just in terms of property damage, it wouldn't surprise me. Maybe even including the major outlier figures, I'unno. Some cursory search for the pure material costs of terrorism in the states turned up mostly that it's a complete pain in the arse to find data on the pure material costs of terrorist attacks in the states. Kitchen fires have fluctuated around half a billion a year, though. Fire damage in total between ~7-~8.
Really though, media and politics don't just
exaggerate the threat of terrorism, they build towering edifices out of aether, consecrated in the blood of civilians killed by collateral damage, and made out of lies, exaggeration, and sometimes a small, barely existent dollop of truth. The psychology of it and whatnot make for damn good ratings and/or votes, and the more people are concerned about it the more true that becomes -- and so there's some folks out there that make damn sure people are concerned about it, regardless of whether terrorism's actually much of a legitimate concern for the country. It's scary, it's shocking, it's like a personal affront to a lot of people. But it's not a
threat, not existentially, not materially to any meaningful/relative degree. Frankly, every country in the world experiencing significant terrorism campaigns could spontaneously stop their conflicts, join together both their military and paramilitary forces, and then attempt to straight up invade the US and
still wouldn't be much of a threat worth note. Most of the threat from terrorism comes not from terrorist attacks, but how our country reacts to them. As evidenced by the amount we spend on the subject, most of it just kinda' uselessly as near as anyone seems to be able to tell
*Note: To try to avoid much of a derail in that direction, it's probably good to note that guns are still less of a killer than alcohol (or any number of other things, obesity among them) by a fairly significant margin, never mind all the other drugs our government spends millions on making sure they do more damage to society that they could be doing. Stateside gun deaths are just an easy figure to use, because they happen to roughly line up with global terrorism related ones.
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Topic: The 'Please Don't Make Me Lock This' Ameripol Thread 2.0 (Read 9014 times)