Not entirely true. There are genuine reasons to fear terrorism (religious and/or ideologically inspired). Some reasons are - such people terrorists/extremists do NOT tolerate others to such an extent that many of them find it almost impossible to leave peacefully with people with even slightly different views/opinions.
Agreed that Heart disease, cancer, and other such things do kill many more people than plain terrorism but same can be said about sleeping e.g. "millions if not billions of people died while sleeping in their beds". Statistics can be (mis)used to justify any claim.
One reason why people find (irrespective of media) terrorism more dangerous than heart disease, cancer, etc is this - heart disease, cancer, and cars are NOT human beings and thus do NOT actively not tolerate difference of opinions amongst other groups of people and do NOT engage in acts of "killing other people for difference of opinions" while human terrorists do engage in such killings and do constantly search for opportunities to kill people with different opinions.
>>How many people in America died in terrorist attacks? About 30. Yes, 30 people.
I guess, either you forgot the 9/11 or deliberately not mentioned it. If later, do you subscribe to the extreme leftist opinion that 9/11 was nothing more than US conspiracy? If yes, I will not be surprised.
>>Perhaps the US should take their survalence budget and use that money to fight heart disease and cancer.
That may be advisable, only if there is a clear evidence that all (religious and/or ideologically inspired (e.g. communists) terrorists and their organizations have ceased their efforts to bring the entire world under their control. Such evidence is extremely difficult to get even if it is there, unfortunately we do see a lot of evidence pointing the opposite.
edit: minor typo
It was the two words immediately preceding your quotation.
Unfortunately you can't do that with all of the guns, bombs, planes, and tanks we have.
1. Anything that could remotely reveal a method of surveillance wouldn't be included in these numbers
2. It's pretty hard to define an "attempted" attack - a lot of attempts might be thwarted in the planning, etc... What about something that wasn't intended to stop a group, but did? Or maybe an underground group that wasn't being monitored, how do we know the gov't stopped them?
The terrorist problem is exactly as we see it. Tiny.
Bombings in the US are way down. Most terrorist incidents in the last 10 years are shootings. The last big bombing was the Boston Marathon, in 2013, and that was two brothers working alone, so intel wouldn't have helped. The last organized plot was in 2009, aimed at the NYC subway and some UK targets. That was allegedly foiled by intel into Al Qaeda communications.
Since 9/11, terrorism in the US [1] has been much less of a problem than routine mass shootings.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States... [2] http://www.shootingtracker.com
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment-...
Do we? Are all terrorist plots obvious? Surely there are successful terrorist plots that have succeeded that we are unaware of.
I am saying, I doubt it's so black & white.
Terrorism can be subtle and long-term.
Edit: What terrifies you? Did terrorists exclusively create this (threat of terror)? My point is, does a terrorist exclusively create terror... or do these terrorists have a broader goal beyond simple terrorism?
If a terrorist shoots my sister, and nobody knows it was a terrorist plot, the destabilization and other negative effects are still there. I will be afraid, perhaps not of ISIS, but I will generally be terrified that someone might shoot me too.
No. Terrorists even take credit for things they had nothing to do with. The goal of a terrorist is to strike fear into the population by committing crimes in the most public way possible. Secrecy of the result doesn't serve this goal. The other reason to publicize is for recruiting purposes.
We certainly know the number of successful plots. Failed plots and fizzles, perhaps not.
My point is, terrorism is not exclusively a single, concentrated moment of terror. Some terrorist plots are more subtle and long-term.
Yes, we do. If you don't know about a terrorist plot, it is not succesful.
Frankly, terrorists have been around for a long time, and they didn't do shit before 9/11 and they haven't done shit since.
If there were an alternate world where 9/11 happened once a month every month (so, 36k people die due to terrorism every year), that would be equivalent to approximately the US car accidents per year (well, technically that's only ten 9/11's worth, not twelve, but whatever).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
And remember, 9/11 only happened once in the last century, so if statistics hold up we're good to go, and we have a spare few billions per year that were funded the TSA.