Related to that

For years and years, right-wing corporate apologists have been slamming warnings about the dangers of unregulated chemicals, the risks of nuclear power, the health effects of pollution, and such as "junk science," as "paranoia trying to scare people," as demonstrating the foolishness of worrying the most about the least likely events. "Why, you're more likely to get hit by lightning that to die of" whatever it is, insisting thereby that the whatever is not worth worrying about. (Of course, by the same logic, since you're more likely to get killed in a car crash than to get hit by lightning, it becomes okay to walk around in a thunderstorm holding a long metal pole over your head, but logic was never the purpose of such arguments.)

Now in the Los Angeles Times for Monday comes Bart Kosko, who teaches probability and statistics at USC. Perhaps without even realizing it, he takes the basis of the wingers' argument and turns it against them.

Deaths because of terrorism worldwide have increased a bit lately (especially after the school attack in Russia), but the number still remains on the order of about a thousand deaths a year, according to the State Department — a small fraction of the 15,000 or so murders each year in the United States, or the 40,000 who die in car accidents.

The Bush administration and many others interpret these facts as proof that the government is winning its "war on terror" (even though Osama bin Laden still roams free and threatens from afar).

And they may be right. It's conceivable..... [But w]e do know that studies of our statistical competency show both that we systematically overestimate the probability of vivid, high-profile threats such as shark bites and terrorist bombings and that we poorly estimate the probability of less glamorous dangers like highway fatalities. The comparative absence of terrorism could just as easily (and I believe, more reasonably) support the very different conclusion that we have overestimated — grossly overestimated — the terrorist threat. We may be "winning" a war against terrorism simply because there are few terrorists out there posing a serious threat to the U.S. We may have traded substantial civil liberties and international goodwill in the last three years for a lot more security than we need. ...

The bottom line is this: There will always be terrorists and legitimate efforts to catch and kill them. But meanwhile, the bigger statistical threat comes from the driver next to you who is talking on the cellphone.

Another interesting comparison - which I can't make because I don't have the figures - might be between Americans killed by foreign-based terrorism and hate groups over the last, say, 10 years compared to Americans killed by domestic-based terrorism and hate groups over that same time. While because of 9/11 I suspect the former number is considerably larger, if I guessed (which I'm about to do), the difference is not as large as we would think, because those killed by domestic hate groups tend to die in ones and twos and threes, not hundreds or thousands at a time, and thus often run below our level of awareness.