A rate of anything going from 7.2 to 9 per year *is* significant. Think of the murder rate in your town making a consistent change like that.

No. It isn't always significant, as you should have realized as you typed the above. If you were talking about the number of fatalities in a town of 5,000 people increasing by a little less than 2 a year, it might be barely significant. As the number of terror fatalities in the entire Western world, it's noise.

For some perspective, find yourself a graph of the murder rate in New York City over the past twenty years. I don't want to take the time to look it up for you right now.

Mother Jones is fooling the gullible by dumping statistics on them and messing with them. That's about all.