As individuals, Americans are generally good at denying al-Qaeda the pleasure of terrorizing us into submission. Our cities are bustling; our subways are packed every rush hour; there doesn't seem to be an empty seat on any flight I'm ever on. But as a collective, irrational cowardice is getting the better of our polity. Terrorism isn't something we're ceding liberty to fight because the threat is especially dire compared to other dangers of the modern world. All sorts of things kill us in far greater numbers. Rather, like airplane crashes and shark attacks, acts of terror are scarier than most causes of death. The seeming contradictions in how we treat different threats suggest that we aren't trading civil liberties for security, but a sense of security. We aren't empowering the national-security state so that we're safer, but so we feel safer.

Of course we should dedicate significant resources and effort to stopping terrorism. But consider some hard facts. In 2001, the year when America suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack -- by far the biggest in its history -- roughly 3,000 people died from terrorism in the U.S.

Let's put that in context. That same year in the United States:

71,372 died of diabetes.

29,573 were killed by guns.



13,290 were killed in drunk driving accidents.



That's what things looked like at the all-time peak for deaths by terrorism. Now let's take a longer view. We'll choose an interval that still includes the biggest terrorist attack in American history: 1999 to 2010.

Again, terrorists killed roughly 3,000 people in the United States. And in that interval,

roughly 360,000 were killed by guns (actually, the figure the CDC gives is 364,483 -- in other words, by rounding, I just elided more gun deaths than there were total terrorism deaths).

roughly 150,000 were killed in drunk-driving accidents.







Measured in lives lost, during an interval that includes the biggest terrorist attack in American history, guns posed a threat to American lives that was more than 100 times greater than the threat of terrorism. Over the same interval, drunk driving threatened our safety 50 times more than terrorism.

Those aren't the only threats many times more deadly than terrorism, either.



The CDC estimates that food poisoning kills roughly 3,000 Americans every year. Every year, food-borne illness takes as many lives in the U.S. as were lost during the high outlier of terrorism deaths. It's a killer more deadly than terrorism. Should we cede a significant amount of liberty to fight it?



Government officials, much of the media, and most American citizens talk about terrorism as if they're totally oblivious to this context -- as if it is different than all other threats we face, in both kind and degree. Since The Guardian and other news outlets started revealing the scope of the surveillance state last week, numerous commentators and government officials, including President Obama himself, have talked about the need to properly "balance" liberty and security.

