In Chad Turner’s article on homegrown vs. international terrorism, he states “Despite the relative ease domestic terrorists may have in carrying out attacks, these attacks are less probable than attacks from international groups.”
This sounded off to me, as I remember doing research on these very statistics back in 2002. I remembered the inverse to be true, that domestic vs. international terrorism numbers are 1 to 10. So, I logged into the RAND research firm’s database and compiled the following list reflecting their numbers.
Rand is a research firm, and does not release its findings until thoroughly researched, so stats for 2010 aren’t out yet.
The US government’s National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has a yearly report, and the anti-Islamic-terrorist website “thereligionofpeace” has a monthly report. The numbers from both of these sources are comparable or smaller than RAND.
Year Int Dom
1995 293 462
1996 571 571
1997 246 259
1998 377 2,172
1999 65 864
2000 47 783
2001 3184 4571
2002 970 2763
2003 470 2349
2004 732 5066
2005 551 8194
2006 294 12071
2007 406 10232
2008 650 5909
2009 106 1197
Source: http://smapp.rand.org/rwtid/search_form.php
These numbers reflect the threat of international terrorism as less than 1000 deaths per year, while domestic terrorism is a little less than 10,000 per year.
With a world population of 7 billion people, the threat of terrorism in general is close to 1 in a million.
In my opinion, this stat should be painted across the people’s minds in big bold letters in an effort to combat terrorism. Only when you realize how little threat terrorists pose, you may see their criminal acts should be handled by the police, not the United Nations.
The fact is, on a global scale, the stories they write with their terrorist attacks are more bark than bite. They have no teeth and want to make you think they do. They exploit the ever-hungry media, presenting them with a compelling story of anger and tragedy and desperation.
To repeat an old phrase, if you let yourself fear terrorism, the terrorists win.