Bicycles more dangerous than terrorism?

You have to be fucking joking !? :)

What level of stupidity must you project onto the readership to suppose that they lack the 'mental agility' to work out that the bicycles are not killing people but . . . bicycle accidents.

Really, this is a silly point. When I read that there were 3,000 car related deaths in a certain period / area - I would not usually presume the cars had somehow got hold of guns and gone on a shooting spree - you should really credit people with some basic understanding of common parlance.

But it's really not that simple. That small evasion has consequences. Accidents on bicycles in and of themselves, ie falling off one, or crashing at low speeds, don't tend to kill people; collisions between bicycles and fast-moving traffic or HGVs do. Do you, knowing that, say with a straight face that 'bicycles kill people'? Thus concretising the image of cycling that is already in general circulation, that of it as an inherently dangerous activity in and of itself (rather than one that is dangerous in conjunction with certain other factors)?

That is what I mean by sleight of hand – small inaccuracies and elisions can have a irresponsible rhetorical effect. Language matters.