There are a number of issues here.
First, I’m not scared of going to America. I lived there for three years and I’ve visited so many times I can’t remember how many there’ve been. I’ve visited about 30 states and many of the major cities. I’ve walked around New York and Chicago at night on my own and not felt afraid.
I did say that the US felt a little weird at the moment. Over 60 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. He is a president unlike any other. It’s a little weird.
Second, I teach statistics. People are incredibly bad at understanding risk. Europe is a spectacularly safe place to visit.
Let’s take one of the worst terrorist incidents in history, 9/11. Now suppose that terrorists repeated an incident as devastating as that every day. Let’s further suppose that you fly on a domestic flight in the US every day. Do you know how likely it is that you’d be involved in a terrorist incident? It’s less than one in a thousand on any given day. You’d have to wait about three years — of flying every day, while terrorists are flying planes into buildings every day — before you could expect to be killed yourself.
But terrorists don’t fly planes into buildings every day. They did it once, sixteen years ago. And you don’t fly everyday. You maybe fly a few times a year.
The threat from terrorism is vastly, vastly exaggerated. You are dramatically more likely to be killed in a road accident or — in the US — to be shot. Vastly, vastly more likely.
So if you’re going to stop yourself from seeing the incredible cultural heritage of Europe, presumably you’re also never going to go to New York (9/11), Florida (night club shooting), Las Vegas (Mandalay Bay shooter), . . . All of those incidents were worse than anything that’s happened in the UK since 2005, twelve years ago.
Yes, the Manchester bombing was awful. But — you know what? Say you were actually there. The chance of you being killed if you were actually there at the time was about one in a thousand. So assuming that terrorists carrry out similar attacks at every concert you go to, you’d have to go to over 1,000 before you could expect to be killed.
And forget Australia. They’ve had terrorist incidents of their own.
I was living in America on 9/11. I went to New York less than a month after it and I flew from Logan Airport, where two of the hijacked planes had taken off.
People need to make sensible judgements about risk. You are most at risk from people you know and those in your own neighbourhood.
Paris, Venice, Rome, Florence, . . . breathtakingly beautiful and fascinating places, with fantastic food. You’d be nuts not to go.
