Terrorist Attacks are Quietly Declining Around the World by Adam Taylor – Washington Post
In the middle of London’s rush hour on Tuesday, a man crashed his car into the security barriers outside of the Houses of Parliament. Police are treating the incident, which left three people injured, as a potential terrorist attack.
President Trump’s response was quick and followed his usual pattern: He fired off an early-morning tweet about “another terrorist attack" in London, comparing the suspect to an animal.
A sense of deja vu is understandable. A little over a year ago, a similar attacker — using a vehicle and then a knife — killed five people and injured more than 50 others outside the Houses of Parliament and the adjacent Westminster Bridge. Trump also tweeted (twice) about that attack — among the 46 tweets mentioning “terror” he made in 2017.
Despite such high-profile attacks and responses, however, statistics released this month by the University of Maryland suggest that 2017 was the third consecutive year that the number of terrorist attacks around the world — and the deaths caused by them — had dropped. So far, 2018 looks on track to be lower still.
The university’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) program found there were 10,900 terrorist attacks around the world last year, which killed a total of 26,400 people, including perpetrators. That was a drop from 2016, which was in turn a drop from 2015. Right now, the number of terrorist attacks and deaths from terrorism appears to have peaked in 2014, when there were nearly 17,000 attacks and more than 45,000 victims.
What explains the downward trend? …