These numbers are really important, especially on a day like today. It's strange how much of a spectacle [1] 9/11 was, almost made for TV. Our 3000 victims of terror are thus acknowledged, depicted, and disseminated throughout the world. As a result, they're remembered in some sense too.
But the hundreds of thousands more whom we maim, torture, and kill across the globe are given no such status -- they're barely even admitted to exist! Simple efforts to just count these people etch them into the documentary record, and allow no one to say they couldn't have known. In this way they serve a similar purpose to Holocaust studies: by tallying the victims you make it harder to forget.