"John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, seems to be moonlighting as a publicist for ISIS. How else to explain his fearmongering warnings about terrorism on Fox News last Friday?
"I was telling Steve on the way in here," Kelly said, referring to Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy, "if he knew what I know about terrorism, he'd never leave the house in the morning."
"It's everywhere," Kelly said.
"It's constant….It can happen almost here anytime."
He probably meant it can happen here almost anytime, but you get the idea:
The threat of terrorism is so severe and pervasive that it's foolhardy to venture past your front doorstep.
Contrary to Kelly's claims, terrorism is not everywhere, and it is not constant.
It is a rare event that is much less likely to kill you than myriad hazards that somehow do not deter us from leaving our homes in the morning.
From 1970 through 2016, according to numbers from the Global Terrorism Database, terrorist attacks killed 3,662 people in the United States.
Nearly 3,000 of those deaths, 82 percent of the total, resulted from the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Counting 9/11, the average is 78 deaths a year, which makes the annual risk of dying in a terrorist attack within the United States 1 in 4.2 million for a random American.
The lifetime risk, based on a life expectancy of 78.8 years, is roughly 1 in 53,000..."
No comments:
Post a Comment