But I admit my original scale assumption was influenced by using the outflow of Syrian refugees as a whole as the most current baseline — that’s a large number of people. If I were to take a smaller subset or alter the ethnic balance, or both, I could also assume higher relative numbers of potential terrorists. Chechens, to take only the most obvious.

I don’t like going to the Mall of America and passing a bunch of cops with bomb-sniffing dogs, which is the current daily state of affairs there.

I certainly don’t want to have to deal with machine-gun armed soldiers at the Smithsonian (see: recent machete attack at the Louvre), or eight-foot-high walls around the Washington Monument (see: current construction plans for the Eiffel Tower), and all the other “fun” that France and other parts of Europe are dealing with currently…

But estimating the danger of future terrorism using a static probability based on current experience is simplistic. You could have concluded based on statistics in 1915 that your likelihood of dying of influenza was pretty small; by 1918 you would have been very wrong. If an airliner tends to develop wing spar cracks after about 2000 landings, and few such cracks had appeared after the plane had been in service for a couple year, a conclusion that the wing spar was nothing to worry about would have been dangerously fallacious.

Hmmmm….

“Census numbers put the state’s Somali population at about 40,000, but community activists have said it’s higher.”

“A total of 10 Somalis from Minnesota have been charged with conspiracy to provide material support to ISIS. [...] Another dozen or so [...] have traveled to Syria to join Sunni rebel groups [...] Another 22 [...] have left to join al-Shabab [...] [in] Somalia.”

So 44 (or 45, including the St. Cloud mall stabbing spree guy from the first link) out of about 40,000 total.

More than 1 in 900…that we know about; we probably haven’t found them all. (And those two news articles may not list all the ones we have found.)

That is by no means only “a few” in “a million”. I’m happy that the majority want to go back home to do their killing, but still…

For the metaphor to work, you’d need a few bad skittles in a bowl of about a million regular ones.

Given one had no need to eat skittles at all, it’s still perfectly reasonable policy not to eat any if you know there might be a few bad ones.

These are the same asshats that mock evangelists who take the Bible literally, right?

A foolish inconsistency is the hobgoblin of liberal memes.