“Terrorism Is Not Effective”, 2009-04-14 (; backlinks):
More effective ways to kill = terrorists are stupid, or killing not most important thing to them
Terrorism is not about causing terror or casualties, but about other things. Evidence of this is the fact that, despite often considerable resources spent, most terrorists are incompetent, impulsive, prepare poorly for attacks, are inconsistent in planning, tend towards exotic & difficult forms of attack such as bombings, and in practice ineffective: the modal number of casualties per terrorist attack is near-zero, and global terrorist annual casualty have been a rounding error for decades. This is despite the fact that there are many examples of extremely destructive easily-performed potential acts of terrorism, such as poisoning food supplies or renting large trucks & running crowds over or engaging in sporadic sniper attacks.