Reuters (“25 years after 9/11, Americans fear domestic extremists more than foreign attacks, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds“):
Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks focused U.S. fears on threats from abroad, Americans are now considerably more worried about attacks by domestic extremists than by foreign groups, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
When asked to name the biggest threat to the safety of average Americans, 33% of respondents picked “domestic terrorism,” while 20% picked foreign terror and 42% pointed to random acts of violence such as mass shootings, the August 28-31 poll found.
The picture was much different a decade ago. Reuters/Ipsos polling from mid-2013 showed 21% of Americans viewed domestic terror as the top threat, less than the 28% who pointed to foreign terror and 51% who picked random acts of violence.
When I saw this story yesterday, my first instinct was to wonder whether a third of Americans named domestic terrorism as the greatest threat off the top of their heads or based on a menu of choices. Unfortunately, there was no link to the poll questions, and Ipsos didn’t have one on their website.
They do now. Alas, this particular question is not among the provided topline questions. But since all the listed questions come with a list of options, I suspect that this one did as well.
I share the topline conclusion that, of the named choices, random acts of violence are more likely to kill the average American than domestic terrorism, which in turn is more likely to do so than foreign terrorism. But I would put automobile accidents, heart attacks, cancer, and being murdered by a personal acquaintance considerably higher than any of those.
I was more than a bit amused by this finding:
At first blush, it’s absurd. Americans overwhelmingly still support a military response to a 9/11-style attack and yet, almost as overwhelmingly, think the wars launched in the aftermath of 9/11 were not worth it. But it would be hard to imagine not going after al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Afghanistan after the attacks. Maybe the answer is to limit the military response to goals achievable with force, rather than trying to remake a medieval civilization into a modern one.
And I’m somewhat surprised by this as well:
I’m clearly in the minority here, in that I wrote much of the airport screening effort as security theater even at the outset. It’s also noteworthy that those who identify with each of the two major parties have almost identical views on the matter; only self-identified Independents are skeptical.
