MachIVshooter
Member
the term "statistically significant" or "statistical significance" has a well defined, technical meaning. And use of the term in a technical sense, together with associated statistical analyses, has application in the social sciences.
I absolutely agree. But terror attacks differ from other injury and injury death statistics in that there is no way to calculate a statistical probability. Homicides, MVA, drowning, poisoning, falls-they occur with regularity, to the point that we can anticipate with reasonable accuracy how many will fall victim in a given time period. We can further analyze the data to determine that people of certain ages, people of certain races, people living in particular areas, etc. are at a greater risk of certain causes of injury or death. Again, no way to know that with terrorism. If it occurs, it can be anywhere, have casualties ranging from 0 in a botched attempt to thousands, and the victims can be anyone of any age/size/sex/sexual orientation/race/creed/religion/ethnicity/nationality. Hence my contention that it is random. Of course, random doesn't necessarily mean insignificant; that I conclude by adding the vanishingly miniscule likelihood to the randomness.
You might be trying to say that the rarity of injury from terrorism is so low that as a matter of probability (statistics) the likelihood of injury is low (insignificant). If so, that's fine. But then the conclusion that low probability equates to insignificance is a value judgment, not a statistical or mathematical conclusion.
It is also a value judgement, but not that alone. The "mass shootings" fall more into that category, as though there is still some randomness to them, they happen with enough frequency and there are enough common denominators that some predictions can be made about them. The contribution of mass shootings to annual homicide rates is miniscule, but the frequency of occurrences enough for them to be tabulated and averaged over a given time period. Not so with legitimate terror attacks.