A February 11 New York Times opinion piece claims President Trump missed the mark with his executive order on immigration, suggesting he would have kept Americans safer by targeting guns instead of Muslim terrorists.
The author tries to support this suggestion by pointing to things that have caused more American deaths than have been caused by Muslim terrorists. However, this deductive process is ruined by fact that the author does not bother naming all the things that cause more American deaths than have been caused by guns.
For example, the NYT piece says,
In the four decades between 1975 and 2015, terrorists born in the seven nations in Trump’s travel ban killed zero people in America, according to the Cato Institute. Zero. In that same period, guns claimed 1.34 million lives in America, including murders, suicides and accidents. That’s about as many people as live in Boston and Seattle combined. It’s also roughly as many Americans as died in all the wars in American history since the American Revolution, depending on the estimate used for Civil War dead.
It’s true that Muslim Americans — both born in the United States and immigrants from countries other than those subject to Trump’s restrictions — have carried out deadly terrorism in America. There have been 123 such murders since the 9/11 attacks — and 230,000 other murders. Last year Americans were less likely to be killed by Muslim terrorists than for being Muslim, according to Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina. The former is a risk of approximately one in six million; the latter, one in one million. The bottom line is that most years in the U.S., ladders kill far more Americans than Muslim terrorists do. Same with bathtubs. Ditto for stairs. And lightning.
