[Infowarrior] - Good paper...A False Sense of Insecurity?

[Richard Forno]

(c/o Boingboing)

In this mind-blowing, exhaustively researched Cato institute paper by Ohio
State University's John Mueller, the case against being afraid of terrorism
is laid out in irrefutable logic, backed with credible, documented
statistics about terrorism's risks. From the number of fatalities produced
by terrorism to the trends in terrorism death to the fact that almost no one
has ever died from a military biological agent to the fact that poison gas
and dirty bombs in the field do only minor damage -- this paper is the most
reassuring and infuriating piece of analysis I've read since September 11th,
2001.

The bottom line is, terrorism doesn't kill many people. Even in Israel,
you're four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a
terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning
strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by
cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism,
our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are
terrified....

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http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv27n3/v27n3-5.pdf

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    Much of the current alarm is generated from the knowledge that many of
today's terrorists simply want to kill, and kill more or less randomly, for
revenge or as an act of what they take to be The shock and tragedy of
September 11 does demand a focused and dedicated program to confront
international terrorism and to attempt to prevent a repeat. But it seems
sensible to suggest that part of this reaction should include an effort by
politicians, officials, and the media to inform the public reasonably and
realistically about the terrorist context instead of playing into the hands
of terrorists by frightening the public. 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." Such messages have led many people to develop what Leif Wenar of the
University of Sheffield has aptly labeled "a false sense of insecurity."