Ryan Singel at Wired News has produced an insightful little chart that compares the odds of dying from a terrorist attack to other causes of death in the United States. According to this data, Americans are more likely to be killed by a policeman than by a toothpaste-wielding foreign jihadist. Snip:
Comparing official mortality data with the number of Americans who have been killed inside the United States by terrorism since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma reveals that scores of threats are far more likely to kill an American than any terrorist — at least, statistically speaking.
In fact, your appendix is more likely to kill you than al-Qaida is.
With that in mind, here's a handy ranking of the various dangers confronting America, based on the number of mortalities in each category throughout the 11-year period spanning 1995 through 2005 (extrapolated from best available data).
