A counterargument: "You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist" http://www.cato.org/blog/youre-eight-times-more-likely-be-

A counterargument: "You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist" http://www.cato.org/blog/youre-eight-times-more-likely-be-killed-police-officer-terrorist http://www.cato.org/blog/youre-eight-times-more-likely-be-ki... In reality, you're more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than be killed by a terrorist. You're 1,000 times more likely to die in a car accident than be killed by a terrorist. And so on. And one reason why the U.S. has been targeted by more Islamic terrorist attacks than say, the liberal democracy of Switzerland, is that we meddle far more in the Middle East countries that terrorists call home. It's policy blowback. On HN, especially, we should be able to do simple statistical calculations of what we really should be worrying about. You're more likely to die from falling in the shower than being eaten by a shark, but one threat gets a lot more media coverage than the other. It is true that some fraction of terrorists would happily kill hundreds of millions of Americans, if they had the ability. So it makes sense to concentrate on existential WOMD threats, improve cargo container scanning for suitcase nukes, place radiation scanners in major population centers, fund defenses against biological agents, etc. To its credit, FedGov is doing that. But it's also doing far more than that, domestically and abroad. HomelandSec "anti-terror" grants have been used to fund cultural centers, zombie apocalypse demonstrations, armored vehicles for one-stoplight towns, snow-cone machines, etc. And people involved in the HomelandSec apparatus have incentives to exaggerate because their salaries or funding levels or relative prominence are tied to the perceived nature of the threat.