Bad reasoning

In an article setting out why much security talk and action after a terrorist attempt is of no practical use, Max Hastings has this paragraph:

It is also hard for ministers and the police to pitch their public utterances. A reasoned statement, following the weekend's events, might have gone something like this: "After so much speculation about attacks on Britain by terrorists wielding weapons of mass destruction and biological weapons, it is a relief to see these attempts made with weapons as crude as cars filled with petrol and gas cylinders. The group carrying out the attacks are grotesque amateurs. At worst, their efforts might have inflicted the level of fatalities caused by a motorway smash." In reality, of course, it would be unthinkable for anyone in authority to say anything of the sort. Spokesmen must talk gravely about "a threat of dreadful carnage", because anything less would sound flippant and irresponsible.

Flippant, irresponsible, and also stupid rather than 'reasoned'. What would be stupid about it is the comparison with 'the level of fatalities caused by a motorway smash'. There's an elementary distinction, observed in codes of morality and systems of law, between an accident, on the one hand, and the deliberate killing and maiming of innocent people, on the other. It's not only the level of fatalities, it's the cause of them, that upsets people. Journalists writing for the Guardian seem more given to overlooking this than 'ordinary' folk.