I disagree. For the majority of the United States, driving in a car is not a choice - it's a requirement to work.

Regardless:

In 2013, 1,660,290 people are expected to be diagnosed with cancer.

In 2013, 580,350 people are expected to die from cancer.

Source: http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@epidemiologysurvei...

Did these people die by their choice also? Maybe they should have eaten more vegetables and exercised more? That's 116 times more deaths in one year than have died by terrorism in 148 years.

If we had 240,000 employees working on cancer prevention, screening, treatment and cures do you think we might be able to bring that cancer death number down by 1%? That would save 5,800 lives per year which is more than the last 148 years have killed by terrorism. (Department of Homeland Security has 240,000 employees, improving screening processes alone would likely reduce cancer deaths by 1% per year).

We invest billions to reduce driving accidents -- and have significantly reduced both accidents and fatalities as a result of accidents via investments in road engineering, vehicle engineering and rules.

We also invest billions in cancer research and prevention. That has reduced the death rate over 20% in the last 20 years. 152,000 lives were spared in 2009 (http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20130116/cancer-death-rates...)

The Department of Homeland Security has 240,000 employees and a budget of over $60 billion. There have been 5,000 terrorist deaths in the last 148 years.

We invest billions to reduce driving accidents

The National Transportation Safety Board has 400 employees and a budget of $100 million. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has an annual budget of $815 million. There are approximately 30,000 deaths per year from vehicle accidents alone.

We also invest billions in cancer research and prevention.

The National Institute of Health has an annual budget of $30 billion. This covers every type of infection and disease, but approximately 550,000 people per year die of cancer alone. Approximately 600,000 people die of heart disease per year.

Can you see how these things are totally out of whack?

DISCLAIMER: This is a comment on a message board. This is not a PhD thesis. There are plenty of additional nits to pick and I'm sure there are plenty of comments nit witty enough to be posted in response. The bottom line is that terrorism is given resources far beyond the scale of the problem and that is indisputable.

If the crux of your argument is the number of employees and funding are disproportionate to the number of deaths, you have to extract the number of employees and monies dedicated to terrorism specifically (If any).

Most of the DHS employees are part of pre-existing agencies that were combined to form DHS.

"187 federal agencies and departments, including the United States National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the United States Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the United States Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration, the 14 agencies that constitute the U.S. intelligence community and Civil Air Patrol"

Edit: removed FBI reference, posted subsumed agencies as per Wikipedia...

Read the disclaimer. I refuse to spend enough time on this to bring it to the level of PhD thesis. The numbers are so unbelievably heavy toward terrorism spending that it is not even necessary. You are nitpicking.

The TSA budget is $7.91 billion per year. Again, that's $7.91 billion toward stopping something that has killed 5,000 people in the last 148 years vs. Spending about $1.5 billion toward stopping something that kills 35,000 per year. Or does the TSA rescue puppies in addition to preventing terrorism?

I'm starting to think I'm on reddit with comments like yours.

My apologies, I didn't realize that a disclaimer meant that everything preceding it could be ignored.

If you truly believe that the proportionality is not debatable, then feel free to cease debating it.

I'm sorry to inform you, but I'll need to see something at least on the level of a 12th grade essay to concisely consider your argument. Simply yelling "It's Too Much!" is not helpful.

DISCLAIMER: I didn't realize that a disclaimer meant that everything preceding it could be ignored. If you truly believe that the proportionality is not debatable, then feel free to cease debating it. Simply yelling "It's Too Much!" is not helpful.

If you want to disclaim facts out of ignorance, go for it. If you spend 30 seconds researching highway death trends, you see that like cancer, there has been a significant reduction in highway deaths in the last twenty years, to the tune of 30% fatality reduction and 70% reduction per mile travelled. This was directly driven by federal investments.

The NTSB budget is a tiny piece of the pie. The US government has sent billions on vehicle safety, road engineering, road remediation, drunk driving remediation, etc.

You keep citing $60B (30% of which is the Coast Guard and Customs/Border Patrol) and 5,000 deaths since the civil war. You're out of touch. What is your threshold number where you care? Do we really need 30,000 people to die annually for you to care?

No, it's definitely a choice. If someone doesn't want to drive they can move to a city. Taking the job that led you to require a car is a choice. Having a kid that led you to require that job that requires that car is a choice, too.

It's choices all the way down.

Excuse me, but are you insane?

There's no way to make yourself safe from car crashes unless you confine yourself to your house. Even if you never drive, you are exposed to vehicular death simply as a pedestrian. There's no way to avoid it without becoming a hermit.

Meanwhile, it's pretty much trivial to make yourself safe from terrorism, if you wanted to. Avoid airplanes, avoid skyscrapers, avoid major cities. Done. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of Americans already happily live this way, although most of them don't do it specifically to avoid terrorism.

Using your logic, being a victim of terrorism is absolutely a choice. My girlfriend's parents live in Arkansas. In the middle of nowhere. 20 minutes drive to the nearest town that's larger than pop. 50, give or take. No terrorist in their right mind would even consider doing anything there.

So just move away from the city, easy peasy. Your choice.

I think this logic is flawed and the argument is a weak one.

The circumstances around a car crash are most certainly not voluntary or by choice. Negligence by other drivers (alcohol, distraction, and other factors) cause deaths to even pedestrians and bicyclists. One could argue that the victims of terrorist attacks are by choice - by choosing to work in a densely populated area or to send a child to school instead of alternative education. I think neither car crashes victims (in accidents caused by others) nor terrorism victims are "by choice". They are victims of circumstance.

My friends who were hit while walking across an intersection might disagree. (Fortunately, neither were killed)

neither is to be a victim of U.S. collateral damage or surveillance