At least when it comes to fighting evil. We have this fixation that banning things makes them go away. If we ban alcohol, the problems of alcohol will go away. I'm shocked that we had the sense to repeal prohibition; maybe people were more critical then. We have certainly not been critical with regards to our war on drugs. We've wasted billions in trying to remove 'illegal' drugs from the world. What could we have done with the effort and talent that has gone into this 'voluntary' war?
There are some things we can't ban, although we'd like to. Unfortunately, terrorists will appear anyplace in the world. And, the current thinking of our leaders is that we must do almost anything to prevent terrorism in this country, no matter the risk, no matter the cost.
The risk of terrorism is a topic discussed in a recent Wall Street Journal, of all places. Paul Campos compares the risk of death by terrorism to the risk of death by some more common means. Nate Silver analyzes the terrorism risk itself.
Campos argues that this war on terror is making us cowards because we are not willing to be treated as adults nor is the government seemingly eager to do so. Silver uses a lot of numbers. Some of the more interesting ones taken largely from the past decade: 1 in 25,000,000 passengers on an American airline was a terrorist victim, the second largest number of people killed in one terrorist attack was 329, there were five times fewer violent passenger incidents in the last decade than in any decade from the 1940s. So, the risk is tiny and getting tinier. Silver is not naive. He recognizes that a terrorist nuclear attack would be really devastating killing hundreds of thousands. Would we not be smarter to focus our anti-terrorism efforts and money here?
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