This is the Kator Daily podcast for Friday, April 13, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Why has fear of terrorism persisted so long and so substantially after 9-11?

John Mueller is co-author of a new Cato report, Public Opinion and Counterterrorism Policy.

We spoke this week about fear, behavior, and government over. and polls about terrorism, you know, or in general, any topic, really, you see that you can

go a certain amount of depth in people's opinions before certain contradictions start to emerge.

Are there clear contradictions about how Americans think about terrorism?

Well, I don't know if you want to call it contradiction, but there is sort of a surprising

development.

It's quite surprising to me when I started looking into this.

There's been almost no change in

Americans attitudes toward terrorism since 9-11, despite the fact of course there

haven't been any big attacks of that sort that you know the number of people being killed is about six per year

since 9-11 by Islamist terrorists and so forth.

But if you look, for example, right after 9-11, they asked the question,

do you think there'll be another large attack killing large numbers of Americans

in the near future?

And 72% so they thought it was likely.

That number hasn't really changed at all.

It bounces around a little bit with events,

but the last time I was asked is still about 72%, 71%. And what I did in my co-author Mark Stewart as we looked at a whole

bunch of trend lines on terrorism since 9-11 and that's the general conclusion.

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