The argument that “terrorism is so rare that it’s not reasonable to fear it” seems to have become increasingly popular in the wake of the San Bernardino attacks. The President himself has repeated it a few times. The problem with this meme is that it is accurate only up to a point, and that point probably unhelpful. In fact, it begins to sound a bit desperate.
For one thing, as Fred Schwarz points out, the same could be said for any number of atrocities that we have nonetheless rightly found it worthwhile to address seriously. Lynching in the Jim Crow south was, relative to the black population as a whole, a rare occurrence, and the likelihood of any particular black southerner being lynched was vanishingly small. Should Civil Rights activists have therefore stopped complaining or focused on “more pressing” matters? The likelihood that any particular American would fall victim to predation by the combined forces of Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1941 was almost infinitely tiny. Nevertheless, we rightly recognized fascism as a threat to humanity. The likelihood of being incinerated by a nuclear weapon during the Cold War was quite small. But it was a serious enough risk to move many people to action in protest.
Nor are the statistics as simple as the meme suggests. Reason says “your chances of being killed by a terrorist are about one in 20 million…. In other words, in the last five years you were four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist.” Fair enough. But being killed by a terrorist is not the same thing as being a victim of terrorism; indeed, the two things are basically entirely different, since the dead cannot be terrorized. A victim of terrorism is a living person who sees, hears, feels, experiences a terrorist incident—and the people who know and care about that person. Barbara Olson was not really a victim of terrorism—she was just a murder victim. Those of us who knew her are the actual victims of September 11. What makes terrorism a political act, as opposed to a lawbreaking act such as murder, is this exponential, reverberating quality. In this sense, I and all my friends and all readers of my blog are victims of the San Bernardino attack.
By the “killed” criterion, on the other hand, Salman Rushdie is not a victim of terrorism. Nor was Molly Norris. Nor were the 352 people wounded in Paris last month, whose lives will never be the same again, or the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, or their terrorized readers. Surely these are absurd conclusions.
If the broader definition of victim is used, and I believe it should be, the simple calculation of your odds of dying (or being injured) is not a fair measure of your likelihood of being a victim of terrorism.
What’s more, successful terrorist attacks are only the froth on the surface of a particularly nasty cauldron, and people know this. For every successful attack, there are an unknown (but greater) number that fail. And for all those that fail, there are an unknown (but much greater) number that are considered and that might have occurred. And for all those that are considered and might have occurred, there is a vast, unmeasurable, background sentiment in support of such attacks—the supporters, harborers, enablers, and fellow travelers who do not choose the jihadist path themselves, but regard it nonetheless as the righteous will of God. Thirty percent of Pakistani Muslims refuse to repudiate killing civilians in the name of Allah, and Pakistan is a nuclear power. That number is 20 percent among Muslims here in the U.S.
It is, of course, true that Americans are more at risk from, say, car accidents, not to mention illness, than from terrorism. But this only teaches us that it would be wise to take precautions against these risks, too. It does not mean, as some writers claim, that terrorism should be regarded as essentially a "nuisance." And it's true that we should not let terrorist threats alter our way of life. But as with the lynching example, the numbers don’t tell the full story. Like the racial terrorism of the Jim Crow days, the terrorism of our age is the manifestation of a much more disturbing malady, one that Americans have perfectly sufficient grounds to fear, and which justifies their demand for action by those sworn to defend the country. Merely citing the likelihood of actually being murdered oneself does nothing to diminish that.
Update: Perhaps I should add that I continue to believe that the United States should welcome Syrian refugees.
In the latest issue of Regulation, I look at the legal doctrine of "professional speech," a subject the Supreme Court has almost completely ignored.
Comments policy