Since 2001 more more people have died on US soil from toppling vending machines than from terrorist attacks.. Yet we are constantly told we need to scrap the entire bill of rights to stay safe. It's ridiculous. Who does this serve?
Unfortunately, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention don't keep track of vending machine deaths, so we're left with Dr. Cosio's less than perfect methods.
Full paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1602339
You could also remind them that ~90 people die every day from car crashes. Each month more people die from car crashes than have died in terrorist attacks on the US.
A similar number of people (to the number that die in car crashes) die from gun violence in the US.
Terrorism should realistically be so far down on someone's lists of cars that they shouldn't be able to justify any ounce of worry on it. Driving more cautiously would be a better use of the anxiety.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
I'm guessing terrorism is under one of the homicides. On most years, slips in bathtubs and bee stings kill more people than terrorists. Drowning, motor vehicles, chemical poisoning, half the crap in the grocery store, too much drugs/surgery... all sorts of things Americans aren't asking for censorship or intervention for that are what kill them en masse.
Terrorism? That just kills freedom when we pass laws to stop it. Just as it's partly intended to. ;)
So true. I don't think even bin Laden himself could have dreamt of the amount of damage we would do to ourselves here in the US as a result of his attacks. The self-induced aftermath is worse than the actual carnage of the attacks themselves and seemingly has no end in sight. Just as it was intended to, but on a whole other, much larger scale, no doubt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzLQOc-B0Ys
Note: Key difference is America became both a surveillance state and a dual state. Dual state is when two governments, public and secret, operate in parallel with one able to bend/break rules to hit certain targets. This model is less likely to cause a revolution given most people never see the other side of things.
It's basically the Prisoner's Dilemma; they can screw us over for more money, and that aligns with their goals, so they do. The real problem is that, due to the way we vote, we're pretty much only letting people into office if they take the asshole choice in the first place.