Does the news reflect what we die from?
This entire analysis is predicated on ignoring tail risk.  Most causes of death are pretty normal events; if we took no measures to prevent any of them then chances are most of them would increase by very small amounts; maybe doubling for the most dramatic cases.<p>Terrorism is especially terrifying in this regard because if left unrestrained, I think it is pretty intuitively obvious that there is no realistic bound on the amount of deaths that it would cause. The lack of deaths is not a function of desire on the part of terrorists to cause death, but just their ability to do so.<p>In some ways this is similar to the reaction to nuclear power -- even though practically speaking it is very safe, if it were to go wrong, it could got wrong on a scale that is not really possible for almost any other source of energy. Regulations and safety practices can go a long way towards mitigating this, but the tail risk remains a huge unknown, not in the probability sense, but in the negative impact sense.