Afraid of flying? Forty percent of Americans are. Yet you'd have to fly every day for the next 26,000 years to assure yourself of dying in a crash. A leisurely canoe ride is more than 100 times deadlier.

Think city streets are unsafe? You're more likely to come to harm in your own home, where every year you stand a 1 in 650 chance of being injured by your bed, mattress, or pillows--and each year 800 Americans die in accidents involving soft furnishings.

We live in a world governed by fear, where packets of peanuts "may contain nuts" and children must...