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The statistics are always misinterpreted; they can't be considered in the same domain. Terrorists fall in the risk domain that is subject to tail events. Toddlers with guns don't. In plain English, you're not going to see a 10x increase in deaths one year from toddlers playing around with guns, while that's very possible with terrorist activity. In fat-tailed domains like terrorism, single, extreme events make up the entire mean, so just because something bad doesn't happen for a short period of time doesn't mean it's any safer. All it takes is one extreme terrorist event to do some serious damage.


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