The Chance of Being Murdered or Injured in a Terrorist Attack in the United Kingdom

On Tuesday, a Sudanese immigrant to the United Kingdom namedSalih Khater crashed his car into cyclists and pedestrians in a terrorist attack in London. Fortunately, Khater did not murder anybody in his attack but he did injurethree pedestrians, one of whom was so lightly wounded that he was treated at the scene and released. The other two wounded people have since been released from the hospital.  Terrorism has been relatively common in the United Kingdom for decades, from the Irish Republican Army to al Qaeda to ISIS. However, there islittle research on the actual risk of a British person being killed or injured in a terrorist attack. This post is an attempt to quantify that risk.According to data from theGlobal Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, theRAND Corporation, and online sources for 2018, terrorists murdered 2,402 people in the United Kingdom from 1975 through August 14, 2018 (Figure 1). Despite increases in the number of murders committed by terrorists in recent years, especially a series of horrible attacks in 2017 that murdered 42 people, the long run trend is a decline in the number of people murdered by terrorists in the United Kingdom. Figure 2 shows that 5,267 people were wounded in terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom during the same period. Figures 1 and 2 only include victims and exclude the terrorists themselves from the death and injury statistics. Using existing data sources, somebody with knowledge and a lot of time could use the GTD a...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs