Ezra Klein, on Terrorism in America:
In the last five years, the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack have been about 1 in 20 million (that’s including both domestic attacks and overseas attacks). [As the chart above from the Economist shows, [T]hat’s considerably smaller than the risk of dying from many other things, from post-surgery complications to ordinary gun violence to lightning.
That said, terrorist attacks obviously loom much larger in our collective consciousness — not least because they’re designed to horrify. So, understandably, they get much more attention.