Steven "Freakonomics" Levitt has a nice follow-up post in response to the kneejerk paroxysm of baseless fear generated in response to his original terrorism post, which I linked to yesterday. In it he reiterates the same reasonable and essential point, which will surely again be ignored by the mob:

A lot of the angry responses make me wonder what everyday Americans think terrorists do all day. My guess is that they brainstorm ideas for terrorist plots. And you have to believe that terrorists are total idiots if it never occurred to them after the Washington, D.C., sniper shootings that maybe a sniper plot wasn’t a bad idea. The point is this: there is a virtually infinite array of incredibly simple strategies available to terrorists. The fact that it has been six years since the last major terrorist attack in the United States suggests either that the terrorists are incompetent, or that perhaps their goal isn’t really to generate terror.