At the risk of sounding heartlessly numerate: campus shootings are so rare that they should mostly be ignored. The danger level is very, very low. If you must worry, then worry about something boring but important like traffic accidents instead.
Trying to characterize terrorism in terms of body bags isn't going to work for many reasons. One is that terrorism works even with small numbers of total body bags. Another, perhaps more important, is that terrorists will increase their violence to match the population's threshold.
Anyways. I don't have any answers. But dismissing terrorism because it doesn't kill that many people kind of misses the point of terrorism in a lot of important ways.
You missed the point.
There will always be many people like you, who aren't personally convinced to shift their security/liberty tradeoff by exactly the current level of terrorism deemed acceptable or unpreventable. There will always be people at far extremes of that spectrum. Probably even some further to the liberty side of that spectrum than you are, believe it or not.
Terrorism doesn't work by targeting you in particular, or by targeting the tails of the distribution. That's not how terror functions. It functions by targeting the fat portion of the distribution. It targets societies, not individuals.
Anyways, if you want to prove me wrong it's easy. Get the TSA to be disbanded by letting lawmakers know about your personal risk tolerance. I'm sure it'll work ;-)
The point can be easy to miss.
Real life isn't a Tom Clancy novel, and many terrorists are not agents of transnational militant organizations with specific and articulated geopolitical aims.
For many terrorists, the terror is the goal.
You can yell and scream and plead that we shouldn't be afraid. And look: I'm not here to disagree. Not at all. I'm just here to tell you that if your appeals started to work, future terrorists would switch to different tactics. And also that terrorists are likely choosing the tactics they are precisely because they think you're wrong about your ability to get the vast majority of people to not be afraid.
Again, no solutions here. But ignoring the fundamental goal of terrorism and mass violence probably isn't a good starting point.
But you rarely hear that grafitti works. Or that road rage works. They might accomplish some goal, but that goal may be difficult to discern. So we tend to qualify the success. "If the goal is..."
If the goal of running a marathon is to improve personal performance...
When the point is unclear to say the least, it is pointless to say it works without saying what it works to accomplish. It's like saying, "dying your hair works."
The point of most terrorism is the terror.
For example this modern misuse of the word terrorism is designed to strike fear into a population, but the point of that terrorism is not just to scare people, it is to coerce them into agreeing to give more power and money to the ruling class.
Hurting and scaring people just to hurt and scare people isn't terrorism, it's probably driven some kind of mental defect like psychopathy though.
Are you saying that all terrorism is for (and thus probably also by, at least allowed by) the ruling class? That sounds pretty conspiratorial.
> terrorists will increase their violence to match the population's threshold.
This is called fear-mongering.
Not only is it baseless, its mumbo-jumbo of self contradicting statements.