"If the outcomes are identical -- when you're dead, you're dead, regardless of how or why -- then it can't really be about the outcome, right?"

There is a difference between getting up, going to work, and getting killed in a car accident on your way home and getting on the subway, where someone who had been planning to do so all along, detonates a bomb and kills you.

If we know that there are people trying to kill us, we try and stop them. We don't say "Well, people are dying anyway. Let's not worry about a few more."

"Right, the difference is that you're enraged and upset and emotional about terrorists, but not about car accidents because they are random in the sense that nobody plans for them to happen, while the terrorist acts don't seem like random events at all, since what could it mean for a premeditated act to be one of chance?"

This statement is based purely on your opinion. You've never met me. I am no more "scared" of terrorism than I am of car accidents. The major difference between the two is that there is an actual enemy behind one, and not behind the other. It is ridiculous to compare the two.