Some statistics for the Browntrouser Brigade
Now, I know that the current right-wingnut meme-dú-jour is that Obama has “downplayed terrorism”. Let’s be clear here. When the wingers say that, what they really mean is “Obama has not used every waking minute of his life trying to scare the hell out of us and politicize terror”. Now, mind you, I’m in no way letting him off the hook for continuing the wars or certain Bush-era policies, but there’s no denying he’s at least trying to approach this like an adult when dealing with the public.
But as to “downplaying terrorism”, one also needs to consider something… how slim the chances really are of a terrorist attack. Nate Silver:
Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas…
Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.
There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.
Now, as Nate closes, “these are just the numbers”. Unfortunately, we have huge swaths of the American populace who are hard of thinking and view numbers and statistics as something elitist, so the pants-shitting paradigm will continue. I seem to remember a lot more terrorist attacks when I was a little kid (“Take me to Cuba!”) but I don’t seem to remember our country acting like a bunch of pants-pissers back then.








