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Yes. Let's put the threat of terrorism in perceptive: In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide, while 31,672 people were killed with firearms

Yes. Let's put the threat of terrorism in perceptive: In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide, while 31,672 people were killed with firearms in America alone, reports CNN’s Samuel Burke. http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-killed-by-guns-than-by-terrorists/ http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-kill...

InclinedPlane 13y ago
Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument. 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.
- digitalengineer 13y ago
  You're right of course. And even the label 'terrorist' can vary. I think if we ask the people living under the threat of predator-strikes they'd say it's the US thats causing a lot of the terror there.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    "Terrorist" does not currently have a well-accepted objective definition. To me a terrorist is a guerrilla fighter who lacks popular support where they are fighting and specifically attacks soft targets for political (rather than military/tactical) goals. Regardless, the casualness with which "collateral" deaths of civilians has been handled for several of the US's recent military activities may be of a different nature but not necessarily on a higher moral standing. This is probably most true of the US's participation in the Yemeni civil war over the last several years, but there is much else worthy of approbation. The theory of arming surveillance drones was always that it would enable attacks on extremely high value targets of opportunity using precision guided munitions that would limit collateral damage. In practice it has resulted in an unprecedented expansion in the extent of the currently active battlefield and a weapon system which appears to be on the same moral level as the car bomb in the degree to which it causes deaths of innocent civilians.
    - scott_karana 13y ago
      Kofi Annan's definition seemed reasonable to me: 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.
salient 13y ago
You can't even average that out, because the vast majority of those 13,000 "terrorist attacks", if true, are certainly inside countries where they are basically at war with each other. And in many of those countries, US contributes to the kill count, although I assume these reports don't count that as "terrorism", even as they blow up 15 people going to a wedding.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument. 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.

digitalengineer 13y ago
You're right of course. And even the label 'terrorist' can vary. I think if we ask the people living under the threat of predator-strikes they'd say it's the US thats causing a lot of the terror there.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  "Terrorist" does not currently have a well-accepted objective definition. To me a terrorist is a guerrilla fighter who lacks popular support where they are fighting and specifically attacks soft targets for political (rather than military/tactical) goals. Regardless, the casualness with which "collateral" deaths of civilians has been handled for several of the US's recent military activities may be of a different nature but not necessarily on a higher moral standing. This is probably most true of the US's participation in the Yemeni civil war over the last several years, but there is much else worthy of approbation. The theory of arming surveillance drones was always that it would enable attacks on extremely high value targets of opportunity using precision guided munitions that would limit collateral damage. In practice it has resulted in an unprecedented expansion in the extent of the currently active battlefield and a weapon system which appears to be on the same moral level as the car bomb in the degree to which it causes deaths of innocent civilians.
  - scott_karana 13y ago
    Kofi Annan's definition seemed reasonable to me: 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.

salient 13y ago

You can't even average that out, because the vast majority of those 13,000 "terrorist attacks", if true, are certainly inside countries where they are basically at war with each other. And in many of those countries, US contributes to the kill count, although I assume these reports don't count that as "terrorism", even as they blow up 15 people going to a wedding.