| ▲ | thwarted 2 hours ago | |
> younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings (I can not say how comprehensive that wikipedia list is). There's more in the 70s and 80s than I was expecting (having lived through the 80s), but given how many flights there are, hijackings have been and are exceedingly rare; and most of these are not even US flights. These are "driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous than flying" and "10x a very small number is still a very small number" numbers. https://businesstats.com/global-air-traffic-number-of-flight... https://easbcn.com/en/how-many-planes-fly-per-day-around-the... https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-air-pas... These numbers only serve to re-enforce that the response of giving up liberty for (the feeling of) security due to terrorist action in the US was probably outsized. General population awareness in general was probably more of a deterrent after 9/11 than any of the first order 9/11 response actions, especially considering that the US gave countries in the middle east further reason to hate Americans and US foreign policy after 9/11. Obviously, terrorist attacks get a lot of air time and column inches, which feeds the perception of the risk. | ||
| ▲ | antonvs an hour ago | parent [-] | |
Having lived through the 70s, part of the issue was the amount of media coverage hijackings received. The Entebbe raid was the canonical example, playing out as it did over a full week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid And there had been another hijacking just the week before that one. You can quote statistics at people all you want, but when something like a plane hijacking is happening nearly two out of every three months on average (throughout the entire 1970s), and sometimes on a weekly basis, and making a big splash in the media every time, people are going to want something to change. | ||