This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 17th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Following the bombing that killed at least three people during the Boston Marathon,

the challenge now should be to put the risk of that kind of terrorist act into the

context of other risks we face every day.

But with emotions running high, that's easier said than done.

John Mueller, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and author of

terror, security, and money provides some perspective.

Yes, this is worse than many of the other events in the sense that there's a lot of

people injured as well as of course as people killed.

And the emotions are certainly not surprising and perfectly understandable overall.

But in terms of the how do we deal with this kind of problem going forward. How typical is that?

Well, there's all there my fear is that it's going to be typical namely there'll be an overreaction and an over extrapolation.

You got some bombs going off at an athletic event and clearly any effort to try to catch

the perpetrators is to say the least well worth

the tax money but then the idea that therefore all sporting events are at stake

uh... and that

thousands of sporting events have to have issues security, that kind of thing

is unfortunately typical as well.

A case in point might be after the underwear bomber took place.

Something had to be done, so one thing that was happened, two things happened.

One was that the president insisted that there be more air marshals on airplanes,

...