I hear this fallacy question again an again. It implies that giving total power to gobertment is "security". It is not.
Giving total control to Stalin meant hundred of millions of Russians got murdered in terror, giving total power to Hitler or Mussolini from democracies meant the total destruction of Germany and Italy with millions dead.
I'm not American, so obviously I'm less emotionally involved. My view on it is that the US is not under any meaningful threat of terrorism. 9/11 was big, but on the scale of decades it is still far down the likelihood list of violent ways an American may be harmed. Murder, Rape and other assaults are a reality too, a far more likely reality.
The real "solution" is "ignore terrorism, it's not a big threat." That's contrary to human nature, but I think it is the most rational response.
Consider a few problems with your statistics. First, 20k of those gun deaths in the US are suicides, which distorts the statistics into pretending to show a certain level of gun violence that's not actually evident. Second, dying in terrorist attacks is not the same thing as dying at the hands of terrorists or terrorist organizations. There are tens of thousands of people being killed every year in Syria, for example, at the hands of al qaeda or other terrorist aligned soldiers. There have been about ten thousand people killed every year in Mexico at the hands of drug cartels in what is effectively a weird kind of civil war happening there. During the Iraq war and during the war in Chechnya terrorists and terrorist aligned fighters killed tens of thousands of people, many of them civilians.
Moreover, very few people die every year from jet crashes. However, that low figure is due to a truly enormous amount of effort and resources put forth, probably in the trillions of dollars per year range, to keep air travel safe and reliable.
That's the danger of using naive statistics and straight death-toll comparisons the way you are doing. Sure, more people are going to die from cheeseburgers than likely will ever die from terrorism. But A: overall that's a good thing, and B: it's not necessarily meaningful.
More importantly, there are much more direct and more substantive attacks against NSA surveillance effectiveness, TSA screening, etc.
For example, with regard to TSA screening it's notable that the TSA has not thwarted even one terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11. However, there are many documented accounts of TSA failures to prevent weapons of various sorts (knives, guns, even bombs) from getting on planes. And there have been attempted attacks on planes which the TSA did not stop but which passengers did.
The case with regard to the ineffectuality of the NSA's surveillance efforts is even stronger. They put out a list of foiled plots where the NSA surveillance had some role and it is wall to wall bullshit. Most of the "plots" are little more than entrapment, and there appears to be no case at all where surveillance was the lynchpin that made the difference between shutting down a plot when that plot would have gone undetected without the surveillance data. Worse yet, there are several examples of cases, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, of outright incompetence where the FBI/NSA et al had a case handed to them on a golden platter and they screwed the pooch and let someone they were warned about end up murdering American civilians. And one has to wonder if those sorts of failures, which vastly outweigh the vast majority of phony "successes", happened because federal law enforcement agencies were too focused on this high-tech bullshit instead of actually doing their fucking jobs.
Any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.
The risk of terrorism that scares governments is not necessarily the casualties (though that undoubtedly is a factor), but longer-term consequences. For example, repeated terrorist attacks on U.S. soil may deteriorate the confidence of citizens in their government, increase the audacity of terrorists, make the U.S. appear weak, etc.
I don't agree with the U.S.'s response to terrorism, but I'm also not convinced that tallying casualties provides an accurate risk assessment. The political risk of terrorism is much higher than, say, automobile fatalities (or firearms, as digitalengineer pointed out in a sibling reply).
People will not lose confidence in the government unless their lives are constantly affected, just like other crimes.
So my question becomes, do the supposed large swathes of angry terrorists not want to damage it in traditional terrorist attacks, or are they being prevented from doing so by the security services, surveillance and border controls etc.
I genuinely believe that some attacks are being foiled though whether it's 1 a year or 1000 a year is extremely unclear.
Just try applying the same logic you apply to other horrible problems which are dealt with but never fully eradicated. Pedophilia. It's a crime. Many cases are foiled. Many are not.
You seemingly don't understand this abstract trade-off the correct way. Nowhere did anybody state that giving total power to the government would be the way to gain total security. You could just as well create a giant prison run by a private corporation and put every single citizen permanently in a cell. Then you'd have basically no freedom and almost total security without any government involvement.
In his case, and the case of Chinese communism, it somewhat debatable whether a strong government is preferable.
I would further never trust any statistics from the old USSR. For instance, the communists were able to dramatically "reduce" infant mortality by simply not recording births until the first birthday, when the child became one.
If you think Stalin was good for USSR you are an ignorant idiot. I am sorry to be so touchy on the subject, but Stalin killed more of my people than Hitler.
...as many important historians have said
And my view is based upon this thread in reddit /r/askhistorians which is managed by professional historians and is generally a reliable source for historical analysis :
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sxp7k/russia...
His policies screwed up a significant part of the world for decades.
We have not a lot of diversity in government, government is nowadays about managing a country rather than anything ideological. Some diversity is better even if other systems are not how one would want to live.
This is not true, at least not in Europe. Most countries have some form of universal health care, and there are benefits for people who do not work, etc. That is more than vaguely socialist, and is definitely not taboo.
You should read the things Lenin did, and the many more things he advocated doing. Read his pre-revolution material as well, he was one of the leading theorists.
> These systems of government did not have all of the answers
That's not true, read anything by Marx, Engels, Trotsky, or Lenin and not only did they have an answer for almost everything, they (especially the latter two) believed maximally that there is "only one way".