[aub3bhat]

Arguing deaths due to <x> happened more frequently than terrorism in some time period is useless, if the underlying process that generates those numbers are widely different.

Rather than thinking in terms of mortality rate over a period, its more accurate to think in terms of events. A single lightning bolt strike can at most affect 0 ~ 10 people with a gaussian distribution. A terrorist attack on the other hand has a long tail distribution and can cause 10^0 ~ 10^4 deaths.

There is no organized cult going around making lightening bolts with explicit intention of causing large scale harm. On the other hand there are several organized terrorist groups which are intentionally trying to do that. As far as being overweight or bad driving habits, billions of dollars are poured into health care system, automated driving and regulations with goal of reducing deaths due to them.

[aswanson]

Bad driving and cardiac/obesity DO cause more than 10^6 deaths per annum and get no where near the proportionate political/media attention that terrorism does. There are 10x the deaths in auto accidents than the worst terrorist attack in US history every single year. The DHS budget alone dwarfs any proportional safety return that could be made by simply raising the legal driving age by a year.

[aub3bhat]

>>The DHS budget alone dwarfs any proportional safety return that could be made by simply raising the legal driving age by a year.

What?? What does legal driving age has to do with DHS budget? You are simply rambling, different mortality causes have different risk models.

Or to explain simply you are comparing "Apples to Oranges".

[joncrocks]

I think what he's saying is that a disproportionate amount of time and money is spent on saving a tiny number of lives.

If your goal as a government is to minimise the number of lives lost that were preventable, then the argument is that there are many more effective ways of doing it other than spending huge amounts on security services.

I presume there's some stat somewhere that says that young drivers are more likely to be involved in fatal traffic accidents. No-one would claim that dying in these accidents is not tragic.

So if you were to raise the legal driving age by a year, you may end up saving lots of lives, and that would be a lot cheaper way of saving lives.

It's not a flawless argument, as one has to balance freedoms with restrictions and the fact that any historic analysis of attacks has to try and unpick the fact that security apparatus was in place in the past. Spending 0 money on security could have unforeseen consequences, and most people would accept that preparing and executing an attack would be easier.