Trump's Muslim Ban- Saving up to 2 lives since 1990

Donald Trump has managed to outrage much of the world yet again this week. He has introduced his much vaunted Muslim ban, which he promised on the campaign trail after a string of terror attacks in Europe and the USA in late 2015.

Of course, banning an entire religion from entry to the United States would have been a blatant breach of the Constitution, so instead the White House has announced that all nationals from 'terror-prone' countries will be denied entry for a certain period. The new 'Axis of Evil' is made up of:

Syria
Iran
Iraq
Sudan
Libya
Yemen
Somalia

Which got me wondering. How many people would still be alive today if previous US presidents had introduced such a measure?

I decided to start in 1990, purely because it was the year I was born. I will admit, I did use the Wikipedia list of terror attacks in the USA. However, like the good historian I try to be, I did check the footnotes. It appears to check out reasonably well.

There is no common definition of what constitutes a terror attack, so doubtless there are some incidents on the list that don't deserve to be there, and some missing that really should be included.

But, using what data I had, I discovered that:

• There have been 71 terrorist incidents in the United States since January 1990.

• They resulted in 3372 deaths (with 2996 of those deaths on September 11th 2001).

• Muslims carried out 24 of those attacks, killing 3118 people. Take 9/11 out of the picture (and I'll explain why below), that becomes 122 deaths.

• Muslims from the countries covered by the Trump ban carried out between 1 attack (on the strictest possible interpretation of the ban) to 3 attacks (broadest possible interpretation). These attacks killed 2 people under the broad definition, and 1 under the strict one (that being the attacker).

• The American far-right (which I have taken to include ultra-libertarians, Christian extremists and violent anti-abortion activists) committed 27 attacks and killed 227 people (168 of them being in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing).

• The remaining 20 incidents, which killed 30 people, were carried out by people whose motives were unknown, who have never been caught, or who don't really fit into any other category (the Earth Liberation Front featured heavily, as did the Unabomber).

Trump's Muslim ban would not have stopped many terror attacks that made headlines around the world:

• The person responsible for the 1993 CIA shooting was from Pakistan.
• The World Trade Centre bombers of 1993 were from Egypt, Pakistan, Kuwait, Jordan and the USA.
• The US Army officer who carried out the 2009 Fort Hood shootings in Texas was from West Virginia.
• The Boston Marathon bombers were from Chechnya, which is in Russia.
• The three men who attacked an art gallery in May 2015, claiming to be ISIS inspired, were all from the USA.
• The San Bernardino attackers were from the USA and Pakistan.

Most importantly of all, Trump's executive order names the events of 9/11 as the rationale behind his executive order. The 9/11 hijackers came from Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and the largest contingent came from Saudi Arabia. The masterminds behind the plot had met in Hamburg, in Germany, and travelled to Afghanistan to plan and prepare their attack. Had Trump's Muslim ban been in place in 2001, it would not have stopped a group of Middle Eastern students coming from Germany. The destruction of the World Trade Centre would still have gone ahead.

This all begs the question. What on Earth is Trump up to? He is inflaming world opinion against the United States, in a manner that makes George W Bush look like Mother Teresa. He is breaking a fundamental norm of liberal democracy, indeed one that is enshrined in the US constitution- that there is freedom of religion.

Instead, this is policy as determined by cable news and conspiracy theorists. Islam is the enemy, in the mind of Fox News, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump. So better ban it, quick. Even if it turns out what you're doing is totally illogical and nonsensical.

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My reluctance to include 9/11 in these statistics is because it was clearly such a one-off event, the mother of all 'spectaculars,' as Al-Quaeda used to refer to them. Yes, it was awful, painful, ugly, and has shaped the world since in ways we still do not really understand. But it is also incredibly atypical, an event that was more akin to an act of war than a terrorist attack. However, as it did happen, and there is no getting around that, I have included it, but also provided the non-9/11 figures for a slightly more nuanced comparison.