The Mathematical Probability Of Dying From A Terrorist Attack In The US

Nerdy N Gon
4 min readFeb 17, 2019
Image from Dice Envy

What is the probability of you dying from a terrorist? It depends on who you are. Most terrorists in the US are pro-white. The ADL said that terrorism killed 387 people in the last 10 years. 71% of them are killed by White conservative terrorist. 26% are Islamic terrorist. So the odds of any given person dying is significantly higher for non-whites. 9/11 doesn’t count because 9/11 is what economist call a “Black Swan” event. If we had a second 9/11, then and only then could we say we average 3,000 deaths every 20 years. But there is no repeatability so we will stick to a 10-year time frame that has a higher degree of reliable repeatability.

https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-report-white-supremacist-murders-more-than-doubled-in-2017

So 40% of the population is at a significantly higher risk than the other 60% and DHS focuses on white terrorism. More Muslims commit terror based on their population percentage but that doesn’t affect your overall probability of any person dying. The direct numbers are more important than the percentage. It tells you the probability of any one person being killed.

378 * 0.71 = 274

378 * 0.26 = 100

What are the odds of any given person dying from an Islamic extremist attack? Only 100 people have died in the last 10 years. Islamic extremist go for everybody. So everyone is at an equal risk.

327 million / 100

1:3,270,000

Pro white terrorist are a bit different. They target specific people. Those people are non-whites which are roughly 40% of the population. Let’s use that data.

325 million * 0.40 / 274

1:474,452

So 40% of the population is 6.85x more likely to get killed in a terrorist attack than the other 60%. In a world where everyone is equal, it does not make sense to focus a disproportionate effort on Islamic terrorism. Yes, yes, Muslims claim more casualties disproportionately larger than their population relative to whites. I get that. But that still does not change the probability of you being killed.

The definition of terrorism has no consistency throughout prosecutions. The term is nothing more than violent hate crimes with small legal technicalities. Since the justification for terrorist charges are inconsistent, the official definition(s) is meaningless when measuring the threat.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4167688/toronto-van-attack-what-is-terrorism/

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/02/555170250/what-is-and-isnt-considered-domestic-terrorism

https://www.rand.org/blog/2018/06/how-do-you-define-terrorism.html

What is the actual probability of being harmed by a terrorist from an attack by its base definition? The one thing all these definitions have is

A: A political motive

B: Violent crime to achieve them

If we look at the FBI crime data, we can get a good idea of how bad things truly are. I’m not going to crunch the numbers 10 years back but I’m certain the results would be similar. If anything hate crimes doubled in 2017 so this might actually be a better outlook on white terror. we can conclude the following

https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/topic-pages/victims

RACE

There were 5,060 victims of racial hate crimes.

4,195 (or 83%) were against non-whites.

865 (or 17%) were against whites.

RELIGION

There were 1,749 victims of religious hate crimes.

1,114 (58%) of the victims were Jewish

314 (18%) of the victims were Muslim

Drop all the Christian and Atheist groups you get 4.3% + 2.3% + 1.8% + 0.9% + 0.5%

171 (9.8%) of the victims were Christian

There are other hate crimes such as anti-gay and anti-women but we will not use those. Why? It would not be clear who committed those crimes since extremist of both sides hate them.

Now Finally. Let’s look at the actual probability of you being harmed based on your population percentages.

White

(327 million * 0.6) / 865

1:226,820

Non-Whites

(327 million * 0.4) / 4,195

1:31,179

Jews

(327 million * 0.014) / 1,114

1:4,109

Muslims

(327 million * 0.011) / 314

1:11,455

Non-Whites are 7.2x more likely to be attacked from a terrorist than whites despite higher population percentages. You could argue that probability will vary based on what race you actually are but the perpetrator is always the same. White conservatives.

Jews and Muslims are 3.6x and 2.7x respectively more likely to become the victim of a terrorist attack than Christians are.

Therefore, from a national security perspective, it would make more sense to focus efforts proportional to the real perpetrator in order to reduce the total amount of casualties. This idea of Islamic extremism being the biggest problem in terrorism is wrong by every metric.

What about terrorism in Europe?

What about it? It’s clearly not affecting the US

What about Antifa?

There is no evidence suggesting the total value of the property they destroy is anywhere close to that of a white supremacist. The threat of Antifa is more speculation based than fact-based.

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