{ "slug": "terrorism-us-civilian", "question": "What are the odds of dying in a terrorist attack in the US?", "category": "crime", "no_reliable_estimate": false, "perceived": { "description": "Gallup has asked Americans since the mid-1990s how worried they are about personally becoming a victim of terrorism. The most recent reading in Gallup's crime-worry battery (October 2022) had 27% of US adults saying they worry \"a great deal\" or \"a fair amount\" about being the victim of terrorism — the lowest in that wave's 13-crime list apart from workplace assault. Earlier spikes after 9/11 and again in 2015–2016 pushed the same measure close to 50%. Even the current \"low\" reading is orders of magnitude above the actual base rate.\n", "rough_estimate": "~1 in a few thousand lifetime feels about right to many worried respondents", "kind": "poll", "survey_source": { "title": "Record-High 56% in U.S. Perceive Local Crime Has Increased", "publisher": "Gallup", "url": "https://news.gallup.com/poll/404048/record-high-perceive-local-crime-increased.aspx", "year": 2022 } }, "native": { "display": "~1 in 4,560,000 per year", "numerator": 1, "denominator": 4560000, "unit": "per year", "population": "US residents, 1975–2024 pooled, foreign-born terrorism including 9/11" }, "normalized": { "lifetime_us_adult": 0.0000129, "display": "1 in ~77,000 lifetime (US adult)", "log_value": -4.89, "assumptions": "Uses the Cato Institute's 1975–2024 foreign-born terrorism figure of 1 in 4,559,768 per year (Nowrasteh, 2025) as the central annual hazard, since that study explicitly includes 9/11 and covers a 50-year window. Domestic (non-foreign-born) terrorism adds a small but non-trivial amount — roughly another 500–600 deaths over 1975–2024 per START's Global Terrorism Database totals — but does not change the order of magnitude. Lifetime over 59 adult years: 1 − (1 − 2.19e-7)^59 ≈ 1.29e-5 ≈ 1 in 77,000. The window choice is load-bearing: the 9/11 attacks account for roughly 2,977 of ~3,500 US terrorism deaths since 1970, so any window that includes 9/11 is dominated by a single event and any window that excludes it drops the annual rate by roughly an order of magnitude. The uncertainty band below reflects that window sensitivity rather than a statistical confidence interval.\n", "uncertainty": { "low": 0.0000025, "high": 0.000035 }, "scope": "us_adult_lifetime" }, "sources": [ { "url": "https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/terrorism-immigration-50-years-foreign-born-terrorism-us-soil-1975-2024", "title": "Terrorism and Immigration: 50 Years of Foreign-Born Terrorism on US Soil, 1975–2024", "publisher": "Cato Institute (Alex Nowrasteh)", "source_type": "reputable_reference", "statistic": "Annual chance of dying in a foreign-born terrorist attack on US soil: 1 in 4,559,768 (1975–2024, including 9/11)", "excerpt": "\"The average chance of dying in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist on US soil was 1 in 4,559,768 a year. For perspective, the annual chance of being murdered by a common criminal in the United States was about 330 times as great as dying in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist on US soil.\"\n", "source_date": "2025-03-01", "source_accessed": "2026-04-11", "archive_url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260509180310/https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/terrorism-immigration-50-years-foreign-born-terrorism-us-soil-1975-2024", "calculation_notes": "Cato divides 3,046 deaths (2,979 of which occurred on 9/11) across the 1975–2024 window by average US population, yielding 1 in 4,559,768 per person-year. Converting to a lifetime figure for a 59-year adult horizon: 1 − (1 − 1/4,559,768)^59 ≈ 1.29 × 10⁻⁵, i.e. ~1 in 77,000. Domestic (non-foreign-born) terrorism adds a modest additional hazard that the uncertainty band absorbs. The \"foreign-born\" restriction is the main reason we treat the Cato figure as a lower bound on the all-terrorism rate rather than a ceiling.\n", "independence_note": "Cato's underlying death counts are drawn from the START Global Terrorism Database (University of Maryland) and RAND's terrorism incident database, so this is not independent of those sources — it is a curated risk-ratio calculation built on top of them.\n" }, { "url": "https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/terrorism-immigration-risk-analysis", "title": "Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis", "publisher": "Cato Institute (Alex Nowrasteh)", "source_type": "reputable_reference", "statistic": "Annual chance of dying in a foreign-born terrorist attack on US soil: 1 in 3.6 million (1975–2015)", "excerpt": "\"The chance of an American perishing in a terrorist attack on US soil that was committed by a foreigner over the 41-year period studied here is 1 in 3.6 million per year. The annual chance of being murdered was 252.9 times as great as dying in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist on US soil.\"\n", "source_date": "2016-09-13", "source_accessed": "2026-04-11", "archive_url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260503094424/https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/terrorism-immigration-risk-analysis", "calculation_notes": "Used as a corroborating earlier vintage of the same risk analysis. The shorter 1975–2015 window gives a denominator of 1 in 3.6 million per year; the longer 1975–2024 window used in our normalization gives 1 in 4.56 million. The direction of that drift (lower annual risk as the window lengthens past 9/11 without a comparable repeat event) is the expected behaviour for a distribution dominated by a single extreme event.\n", "independence_note": "Same author and underlying datasets as the 2025 update. Included as a longitudinal consistency check, not as an independent estimate.\n" }, { "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism", "title": "Terrorism", "publisher": "Our World in Data (Max Roser, Bastian Herre, Hannah Ritchie)", "source_type": "reputable_reference", "statistic": "Terrorism caused roughly 1 in 2,000 global deaths in 2019; North American terrorism deaths are typically low outside 9/11", "excerpt": "\"Deaths from terrorism in North America are typically low – but the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001 stand out. [Globally in 2019 terrorism] caused an estimated 1 in 2000 deaths that year.\"\n", "source_date": "2024-01-01", "source_accessed": "2026-04-11", "archive_url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260402162118/https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism", "calculation_notes": "Used as an independent check on the order of magnitude and on the 9/11-dominated shape of the US distribution. OWID draws on the START Global Terrorism Database and IHME Global Burden of Disease, which are upstream of (but largely independent of) Cato's risk-analysis pipeline.\n", "independence_note": "OWID's death counts come from START GTD and IHME GBD directly. Cato also uses START GTD but layers its own per-visa-class and per-window accounting on top, so the two sources share underlying event data but produce their statistics independently.\n" }, { "url": "https://news.gallup.com/poll/404048/record-high-perceive-local-crime-increased.aspx", "title": "Record-High 56% in U.S. Perceive Local Crime Has Increased", "publisher": "Gallup", "source_type": "reputable_reference", "statistic": "27% of US adults worry a great deal or fair amount about being a victim of terrorism (October 2022)", "excerpt": "\"At the other end of the spectrum, Americans worry least about being assaulted or killed by a coworker on the job (9%) or being the victim of terrorism (27%).\"\n", "source_date": "2022-10-18", "source_accessed": "2026-04-11", "archive_url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260429013948/https://news.gallup.com/poll/404048/record-high-perceive-local-crime-increased.aspx", "calculation_notes": "Used for the perceived-risk side only. The 27% figure is the share of respondents reporting \"a great deal\" or \"a fair amount\" of worry; Gallup does not elicit a subjective probability. Historical peaks in the same item reached roughly 47–49% in the months after the 2015 Paris attacks and San Bernardino shooting.\n", "independence_note": "Gallup telephone polling, entirely separate from the START Global Terrorism Database, RAND, and Cato pipelines that feed the probability estimate. Used only for the perceived-risk axis — measures public worry, not incidence.\n" } ], "comparison_anchors": [ { "label": "Death in a car crash (lifetime, US)", "lifetime_us_adult": 0.0108 }, { "label": "Being murdered (lifetime, US, pooled)", "lifetime_us_adult": 0.00348 }, { "label": "Dying in a plane crash (lifetime, US adult, ~2 flights/yr)", "lifetime_us_adult": 0.000017 }, { "label": "Death by lightning strike (lifetime, US)", "lifetime_us_adult": 0.00000354 } ], "personal_factor_multipliers": [ { "factor": "Residence in high-density urban target area (NYC, DC, LA)", "multiplier": 5, "notes": "START Global Terrorism Database (GTD), University of Maryland: historical US terrorism incidents from 1970–2024 are geographically concentrated in a handful of major metropolitan areas; New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angeles account for a disproportionate share of both incidents and fatalities, yielding approximately 5× the per-capita terrorism death rate for residents of these cities versus the national average." }, { "factor": "Regular attendance at large public events or iconic soft targets", "multiplier": 3, "notes": "START GTD and RAND Corporation terrorism target analysis: soft targets — concerts, sports venues, open-air markets, transit hubs — account for an elevated share of mass-casualty terrorism incidents globally; individuals who regularly attend large public gatherings face approximately 3× elevated situational exposure compared with those whose routines keep them away from high-footfall symbolic locations." }, { "factor": "International travel to State Department Tier 3–4 advisory countries", "multiplier": 10, "notes": "US State Department Travel Advisory system and START GTD global data: Americans traveling to countries rated Level 3 (Reconsider Travel) or Level 4 (Do Not Travel) experience approximately 10× the per-day terrorism fatality risk compared with domestic US daily life; the GTD documents that terrorism death rates in active-conflict and high-instability countries are orders of magnitude above the US baseline." }, { "factor": "Work in federal government, military, or law enforcement", "multiplier": 3, "notes": "START GTD and FBI Terrorism Task Force reporting: government facilities, military personnel, and law-enforcement officers are historically over-represented as terrorism targets in both domestic and international incidents; occupational exposure to government or security roles is associated with approximately 3× the background civilian terrorism fatality rate based on target-type distributions in the GTD." } ], "short_label": "Terrorism", "myth_framing": "overrated", "outcome_severity": "fatal", "exposure_pattern": "acute", "outcome_type": "death", "valence": "negative", "caveats": "The \"1 in 77,000\" figure is a pooled, window-sensitive average over fifty years of data that is overwhelmingly shaped by a single morning in September 2001. Strip out 9/11 and the annual hazard falls by roughly an order of magnitude; keep 9/11 but shorten the window to only the post-2001 years and the average rises. Neither of those is wrong, but both would tell you something different about \"typical\" years. The figure also says nothing about which Americans face which share of the risk: terrorism deaths in the US are concentrated by target (iconic buildings, federal facilities, large gatherings), geography (a handful of metropolitan areas), and year (a very small number of events account for the bulk of cumulative deaths). For the vast majority of residents in the vast majority of years, the annual hazard is effectively zero.\n", "quality_score": { "d1": 4, "d2": 4, "d3": 4, "d4": 4, "d5": 4, "d6": 4, "d7": 5, "d8": 4, "avg": 4.125, "scored_by": "claude-code-8d", "scored_at": "2026-05-25", "methodology_version": "1.2" }, "reviewer": "likelier-phase-5-agent", "last_reviewed": "2026-04-11", "reviewed": true, "generated_at": "2026-04-11", "image": { "alt": "A single muted candle flame held upright against a pale grey background, flat vector illustration." }, "attribution": "Likelier — https://likelier.app", "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/", "support": "https://buymeacoffee.com/kgluszczyk?via=likelier&utm_content=api-fear-single", "canonical_url": "https://likelier.app/terrorism-us-civilian" }