Same panic, much less bloodshed than your average bombing – everyone’s a winner.

Dude, my friends and I gamed this one out during a discussion of “if we were al quada what would we do” I used the example of the DC snipers and the hysteria they caused – and that was just two people with a rifle and a car. Imagine 10 or 20 pairs repeating it throughout the US - even for a couple of months.

That combined with a bunch of bragging on Al Jezera would likely be enough to send the country over the edge.

Larger shopping malls exist in Turkey (Cevahir Mall), China, India, Japan, Canada (West Edmonton Mall), the Philippines (Mall of Asia, SM North EDSA, SM Megamall), and Malaysia (Berjaya Times Square, 1 Utama, Mid Valley Megamall). South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, California and King of Prussia Mall in suburban Philadelphia have more retail space.

How about zero? Don’t you get it—9/11 changed everything! :(

Let’s see … Disney World … Mall of America … MGM Grand … great, now I’m probably on a list :)

In general, the only thing you can usefully do with terrorism is start a war. If you try to use it for some other purpose, it won’t work, for reasons related to why slapping, spitting and name-calling are not taught in unarmed combat classes.

It’s one bombing per day that we hear of, and the (seemingly) daily discovery of batches of 20-50 bodies showing signs of savage torture…

Considering that one bombing per day + a few such batches each week would tune out lesser acts, I imagine that individual killings are very, very, very frequent in Baghdad.

I guess its the way many people mess up statistics – rare events are seen as more personally threatening that moderately common events, because you hear about the more common events happening on a regular basis (if they are newsworthy) and you still havent been involved, so it becomes obvious you are very unlikely to be the victim of such an attack (which is correct of course), but for very rare attacks you dont have that background of similar events going on and this seems to make some people consider themselves more like.

For example killing 300 people a year in small bunches means people will hear on the news every week or more of a few more people being killed. If you kill 3000 people in one go every 10 years, you kill the same amount overall but you make more impact, it is remembered for much longer, and I am pretty sure the majority of people will consider themselves much more afraid of the single attack, in the long run, although there is no statistical reason to (as both are effectively 1 in a million per year if we were to consider the US as the example population).

As for the previous comment about the Beltway Sniper, regardless of his (alleged) claims about being inspired by 9/11 and aQ, he has been effectively pigeonholed as a traditional, American-style crazy-with-a-gun. If any other quasi-Muslim Americans had followed his path, it might have added up to more, but as an obviously unsound “lone wolf,” he’s easy to ignore (as a phenomenon, not when he was actually out there shooting). Lesson? Mere random shootings are inadequate to terrify Americans. Thanks, NRA.