Around 44,000 Americans will die in traffic accidents this year. A few simple measures would save many of those lives. For example, given that nearly half of all traffic fatalities involve alcohol, a technologically simple device that would prevent an intoxicated person from starting a car's engine would cut auto fatalities drastically.
Even simpler measures — such as lowering speed limits and banning models that have a tendency to roll over and/or crush smaller cars — would save a good number of lives as well.
Why then does our government not enact such measures? The answer is obvious: Because we value a certain level of convenience and freedom more highly than the perhaps 20,000 or so lives per year that taking steps of this kind would save.
All this raises the following question: Why is a death caused by terrorism apparently almost infinitely worse than a death caused by a drunk driver or an SUV? Imagine what measures we would allow our leaders to enact if terrorists were killing an average of even 3,000 Americans per year. After all, a single incident resulting in roughly that many civilian deaths has led to drastic incursions on civil liberties and the current hysterical climate of "orange" and "yellow" terror alerts, etc.
As for the prospect of terrorists killing 20,000 Americans per year, it goes without saying that in the present political climate our leaders would use such a "crisis" as an excuse for enacting something very much like an old-fashioned Soviet bloc police state.
Yet we accept 20,000 easily avoidable annual traffic accident deaths as something so unimportant that we can't be bothered to undertake the simple changes that would save those lives. Why?
The answer is complicated, but part of it turns on the irrational and indeed superstitious belief that, while terrorism is terrifying precisely because of a sense that there is little or nothing one can do to avoid becoming a victim of it, each of us has control over whether or not we die in a traffic accident.
This belief is irrational because, if anything, it's a good deal easier to reduce the already infinitesimal odds that one will be killed by a terrorist (by, for example, not living in a famous American city) than it is to lower the far higher odds that the next SUV coming in the opposite direction won't be driven by a drunk in the grip of road rage.
The media also play a key role in creating our otherwise inexplicable combination of indifference to high risks and terror of low ones. For the national media, a crude explosive device going off in an empty law school classroom is "breaking news," while the 115 Americans who died in traffic accidents that same day barely rated a mention in their local papers.
The war on terrorism is a good deal more frightening than terrorism itself because the measures taken in its name are likely to pose a far greater danger to the average American than Osama bin Laden or any of his miserable imitators. This war is dangerous precisely because victory has been defined in a way that it will make it impossible to achieve — which of course is a recipe for undertaking endless excesses in the pursuit of the unachievable.
If our government took the same attitude toward auto fatalities that it takes toward terrorism, driving would be illegal. Yet people who would scream in outrage if the speed limit were lowered by five miles per hour are largely indifferent to far greater incursions on their freedom, that buy them far less safety in exchange for what's left of their liberty.
Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado. His e-mail is paul.campos@Colorado.EDU.