Post 9/11 America Is Remarkably Safe

Yesterday was the 16th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Those attacks murdered 2,983 innocent people and remain the deadliest in world history by a factor of anywhere from6.4 to9.1 (many disagree whether the1978 Cinema Rex fire in Iran that killed 470 people was terrorism). All of the 19 hijackers were foreign-born, 15 from Saudi Arabia, 2 from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Lebanon and Egypt. They all entered lawfully, 18 on tourist visas and 1 on a student visa.Many folks prophesied a new world of near constant destructive terrorist attacks on U.S. soil that would frequently rival 9/11. These predictions were repeated so frequently that a version of the phrase “a post 9/11 world” became clichéd.  That vision of a terrible future never happened.Remarkably, the chance of dying in a terrorist attack after 9/11, no matter the origin of the attacker, was actually lower in the post 9/11 world of 2002-2016 than it was in the pre-9/11 world (14 years before the attacks). After 9/11, the annual chance of being murdered in an attack on U.S. soil committed by any terrorist was about 1 in 26.4 million per year – far lower than the 1 in 16.9 million per year prior to 9/11. The chance of being murdered by U.S. born terrorists in a domestic attack also decreased after 9/11 as it fell from about 1 in 18.1 million a year to 1 in 37.9 million per year (Table 1).Foreign-born terrorists murdered 26 people on U.S. soil since 9/11 through the end of 2016, meaning the chance ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs