This One Thing Is 12,000-Times More Likely to Harm You Than Terrorism

After a rash of terrorist attacks across Europe and the U.S., many across the world are on edge over the spread of terrorism, but as one video highlights, the world in general isn’t facing a new, unstoppable wave of danger.

In a video shared from Zinc, they ask, “What’s the biggest threat facing the West? Clue: it’s probably not what you think.”

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The video says that Europe has seen a “wave of terrorist attacks,” but points out that “terrorism in Europe is at a lower level now than in the 1970s and 80s.” Groups like the IRA, ETA, Red Brigade, Japanese Red Army, and the Baader-Meinhof Group, repeatedly attacked people and places in Europe.

The video continues to explain that for the last 10 years (2005-2015), there were 24 deaths from Islamist terrorism in the U.S., while Americans killed by gun violence reached 301,797, according to stats shared from PolitiFact.

“So you’re over 12,000X more likely to be killed by a gun than by a terrorist,” the video states.

“Last year, more Americans were killed by toddlers with guns than by terrorists,” according to numbers from the Washington Post.

So, the video asks, why aren’t more people talking about gun violence? “Who benefits from this fear [of Islamic terrorism]?”

The video was shared on July 29, but has quickly gained over 10 million views, drawing thousands of comments and shares.

Some commenters pointed out the exclusion of 9/11 where over 3,000 Americans lost their lives, but as moderators on the post point out, even accounting for statistics back to 2001, a person is 130-times more likely to be killed by gunfire than a domestic terrorist incident (which are not all carried out by people of the Muslim faith, it should be noted).

Videos like this are meant to stir debate and it asks the hard question of whether our fears are justified over a string of violent incidents. The numbers don’t back up the rhetoric that America (or the world) is in a state of heightened violence that we haven’t seen before.