Terrorism and your personal risk assessment

There are 24 hours in a news day, and the cable news networks have to fill every second of it. So we can expect a steady diet of warnings about ISIS plots to attack and destroy all manner of American soft targets this Holiday Season...

So should we worry?

Maybe.

Americans as a rule are pretty bad at risk assessment. We worry too much about the wrong things. But are we justified in worrying about threats from ISIS? I've got two thoughts on this...

1) Is there a real personal threat to you from ISIS attacks?  Probably not. There are 350 million Americans spread out across 3.1 million square miles. The chances that ISIS will attack and that you will have the bad luck to be standing close enough to be shot or blown up when they do is infinitesimally small. So yeah, be aware, don't walk around staring at your phone, have good situational awareness, but don't let fear of dying in a terrorist attack change the way you live your life at all. To paraphrase one of the dopiest meme we've ever come up with as Americans, that's how the Terrorists win.

2) Is there a real threat that a terrorist attack on America will change the country in ways that will negatively affect you and your family? Absolutely yes. 9/11 gave us The Department of Homeland Security... that Jaba The Hutt of Government Agencies, and its Salacious Crumb the TSA. From that flowed the Patriot Act, the NSA Warrantless Surveillance programs and, presumably, that giant NSA monstrosity in the Utah Dessert that runs so big and so hot that it routinely melts its own servers.

Is ISIS a threat to our way of life? Sure... but you know what the true existential threat to America really is? Massive growth in the size of Government and the explosions of debt and loss of Liberty that inevitably comes with it.... that is the true existential threat to our Nation, and if ISIS does pull of a successful attack on our Homeland, the real damage will occur when we beg our Government to overreact to the threat and they happily oblige.