[cmdrfred]

Intent is valid point, number of casualties is not. Terrorism is nearly statistically insignificant in the scheme of things. If you are truly concerned about human life buying mosquito nets will offer you much greater ROI compared to any anti-terrorism measures you can envision.

[oneeyedpigeon]

You're right, I should have been way more specific. I mean number of casualties in the one specific incident. Terrorist acts often involve tens, if not hundreds, of people, both killed and injured. In the vast majority of cases, a drink-driving accident will affect a handful of people.

Nothing about any of this is very rational, but there's something in our collective nature that draws more attention to a single incident involving X casualties than X/Y unrelated incidents each involving Y casualties.

[IkmoIkmo]

> Terrorist acts often involve tens, if not hundreds, of people, both killed and injured.

Actually terror attacks that harm more than 10 or 100 people, as opposed to less than 10, are a small minority. [0]

[0] http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2013/224831.htm

[dsq]

The fallacy in the "terror kills statistically insignificant numbers of people compared to driving" type of argument is that the intent of the perpetrators is to cause as much damage as possible, unlike the average text reading driver, and they are prevented from doing so by the police and spy agencies. Left to act freely, the perps would kill thousands or millions gladly.

[cmdrfred]

>Left to act freely, the perps would kill thousands or millions gladly.

Firstly, these are mostly teenagers in caves with yesterdays cell phones. They simply don't have the resources or the numbers to kill millions, or even tens of thousands. I don't think you understand that your argument is a purely emotional one[1]. It appears to be rather simple to sneak a firearm on a plane[2], and yet there has not been any repeat attacks like 9/11. Firearms are illegal in Paris and they have large divisions of domestic and foreign spies, that failed to prevent anything[3]. Now lawmakers around the globe want to outlaw prime numbers (encryption) yet terrorists don't seem to even bother using it[4]. Emotion aside, dollar for dollar, fighting malaria is more effective in preventing the loss of human life than fighting terrorism by many orders of magnitude.

[1]"If a man is crossing a river And an empty boat collides with his own skiff, Even though he be a bad-tempered man He will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the boat, He will shout to him to steer clear. And if the shout is not heard he will shout Again, and yet again, and begin cursing - And all because there is somebody in that boat. Yet if the boat were empty, He would not be shouting, and he would not be angry." - Chuang Tzu

[2]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-percen... [3]http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/18/europe/paris-terror-attacks-in... [4]https://bgr.com/2016/03/22/paris-attacks-iphone-encryption/