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Beyond the immediate violence and horror of a terrorist attack, and its wider fallout, the last of its victims is always perspective. It’s designed to be.

For the desperately unfortunate minority directly affected by heinous acts of violence, that perspective might reasonably be unrecoverable. For the more fortunate majority, it’s essential it never slips from our grasp.

It seems that the sub-cerebral response of an alarming range of political figures—if someone’s stabbed, bombed, or shot by some petty criminal-turned suicidal zealot—is to ramp-up public surveillance, erode civil liberties, dismantle civil protections within the criminal justice system, rant about ‘cowardly acts’, and anthropomorphise cities.

I’m unclear whether that’s because certain policymakers perceive an opportunity in the lack of public perspective, or whether they simply lack perspective themselves. In either case, what’s even more worrying is that the public seems to be in a growing state of consensus with them — if not emulation.

Usefully, The Telegraph on Sunday cited some figures from the Global Terrorism Database, which are altogether more helpful than HM Government’s public statements for making sense of recent chaos:

UK Deaths Owing To Terrorism

To add further perspective, I looked up the Office for National Statistics’ figures on UK homicides, which record 518 murders in the UK in the year ending March, 2015. Of these, 186 victims were women, of which 82 were murdered by their partner or ex-partner. That was, continuing a decade-long trend, the lowest number of homicides in ten years.

So:

• 2015 saw the lowest number of UK homicides in the late modern era.
• In 2015, 82 women were murdered by their partner or ex-partner.
• In the 15 years from 2000-2015, 90 people were murdered in terrorist incidents.

If it’s a question of quantum, heterosexual relationships appear to be a greater threat to public safety than extremist Islam, by a factor of 15.

Shouldn’t we be affording crimes of passion 15 times the disapprobation than we afford a crime of terror? Has the heterosexual community had too little to say on the subject, given the heinous atrocities committed by its members?

With the benefit of perspective, we readily attribute cases of criminal violence to a minority of nut-jobs who have fallen off the wagon, and park the problem with the criminal justice system. Without perspective, we readily attribute cases of criminal violence to a wider narrative, and seek solutions from law makers, rather than from law enforcement. The threat becomes quantified by column inches, social media real estate, and leveraged by pre-existing prejudices.

The threat of ‘Islamic terrorism’ has been a constant background noise in the informational world of western societies since 2001, and wider debate about the true nature, origins, and threats, is not one I’m suggesting that we mute. But, in the meantime, Khuram Butt’s decision to watch the Champion’s League final, and then embark on a murder-suicide rampage in a hired van, simply must not be used to calibrate civil liberties. And if Abedi’s murder of 23 people in Manchester alters someone’s perceptions of British Muslims, more than Harold Shipman’s murder of over 230 people alters their perceptions of white British GPs, we need to understand why.