It was not an appeal to people's emotions, but rather an appeal for an understanding of people's emotions and an understanding of the milieu in which certain actions took place. Some people become very sanctimonious and judgmental when they feel comfortable and secure, even though they behave much differently when faced with a tangible threat. Ten years on from the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it is easy to boast about how silly and fearful everybody was about the threat of terrorism, but in part this is due to a cognitive bias (hindsight bias), which is perhaps canceling out the fear derived from another cognitive bias (availability bias). Perhaps the war on terrorism is an irrational overreaction, and perhaps it isn't. I don't actually know the answer. When you're dealing with "man-made disasters," a statistical analysis can be misleading, since there is the potential for positive feedback. I do have confidence in the following prediction, however. If a man-made mass casualty event (e.g. 100,000 deaths or more) ever happened in the US, we would become a police state, and people like Rand Paul would probably be laughed out of town or beaten to death. So even though 100,000 deaths might seem like small potatoes relative to a population of 320 million (in which there are 140,000 deaths per year due to unintentional injury, another 40,000 due to suicide, and another 15,000 due to homicide), the impact on our civilization would be dramatic.
In any case, the attack in Paris sort of freshens up and sharpens our understanding of what life was like immediately after 9/11. Maybe somebody who lives in St. Louis, Missouri doesn't quite feel it as poignantly as somebody who lives in New York, or especially Paris, but I suspect there are some people who have changed their views based on a new appreciation of the stakes. Admittedly, most of them are probably French. Monsieur Hollande seems to have turned into a pitbull overnight. I doubt that out of sight of the cameras, he will still be wearing any gloves.
