Can someone just run a plain marathon without having to worry about this in modern civilized life? Come on. This isn't even crime, this is just insanity.
No more how much modern life keeps improving, tragedies will happen, whether by natural disasters or nutjobs. Actively fearing that which is outside of your control is pointless.
Of course, that is general foot transportation. Marathons have different risk factors, you aren't going to get hit by a car (if it's a well organized marathon with a set path and stuff) but I bet there are a lot of medical issues that arise from marathons and overexertion. If I were a betting man, I'd think the marathon was probably more dangerous.
It's really difficult to compare the risks of walking vs driving since usually they aren't really interchangeable and they have such different use cases. But the original comment was about running a marathon vs driving the same distance.
In lots of places in the world, no.
I know it is too early to speculate, but my money is on the muslims -- homegrown terrorists/IRA use car bombs and you couldn't get a car there, crazy people seem overwellmingly to prefer guns.
There are iranians and arabs arguing against islamic fundamentalists getting into Swedish politics. You know, those homophobes who "like" al-qaida on Facebook