No, this is not WWIII

Recently quite a few people have been using the term WWIII to speak about the new escalation of global terrorism. This is wrong. If the comparison relates the number of victims, we are not anywhere near WWIII. 80 million people died in WWII and the world had 2.5bn people then, if WWIII means something of similar magnitude, 240 million people would have to die in this war today, I think the chances of something like that are incredibly small. The world is safer than it’s ever been. The probability of any of us dying in an armed conflict or victims of terrorism is insignificant. Yes, there are and there will be global terrorists, before it was Al Qaeda, now ISIS,  and yes they maybe will kill around 1000 people per year in the USA and EU during the next decade. I am not denying terrorism, nor saying that it will go away.  But terrorist attack like Paris are not WWIII.  There’s no way that 3% of the world’s population will be killed by a few people with Kalashnikovs and explosives. Now in the Middle East, there have been many more victims than in EU/USA from terrorism and regional wars.  Over 1 million Muslims have died, mostly killed by other Muslims, in the Iran-Iraq war, the Lebanese civil war, the Algerian civil war, the Syrian civil war, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Libyan civil war and the confrontations involving Muslims vs Christians in Africa. And this wars will probably go on, but these are local conflicts, not WWIII. It would be surprising to know that even in the Israeli Palestinian conflict over the last 30 less than 15,000 people have died while every day in the world around 150,000 people die of natural causes.  So while we will have regional wars and conflicts, and we will have terrorism, the vast majority of humanity will wake up and go to sleep day after day without anything violent ever happening to them.  And the proportion of violent deaths to total deaths keep shrinking decade after decade.