Sources:Terrorism (2015): National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism 2016. War, US and Western Europe (UK + NATO) (2015): icasualties.org, http://icasualties.org. War, World (2015):
Start with the United States. What jumps out of the table is the tiny number of deaths in 2015 caused by terrorism compared with those from hazards that inspire far less anguish or none at all. (In 2014 the terrorist death toll was even lower, at 19.) Even the estimate of 44 is generous: it comes from the Global Terrorism Database, which counts hate crimes and most rampage shootings as examples of “terrorism.” The toll is comparable to the number of military fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq (28 in 2015, 58 in 2014), which, consistent with the age-old devaluing of the lives of soldiers, received a fraction of the news coverage. The next rows down reveal that in 2015 an American was more than 350 times as likely to be killed in a police-blotter homicide as in a terrorist attack, 800 times as likely to be killed in a car crash, and 3,000 times as likely to die in an accident of any kind. (Among the categories of accident that typically kill more than 44 people in a given year are “Lightning,” “Contact with hot tap water,” “Contact with hornets, wasps, and bees,” “Bitten or struck by mammals other than dogs,” “Drowning and submersion while in or falling into bathtub,” and “Ignition or melting of clothing and apparel other than nightwear.”)3
In Western Europe, the relative danger of terrorism was higher than in the United States. In part this is because 2015 was an
