Did Bush make us safer?

Charles Krauthammer has an opinion piece which argues that President George W Bush's policies have made us safer.  This being a claim that is somewhat empirical in nature, I decided to check out whether this is accurate.

First, let's consider gun deaths.  What we find is that the aggregate number of gun deaths was not materially lower post President Bush:

Next we find that the rate of gun deaths per 100,000 people also did not drop post Bush:

Of course, Krauthammer didn't mean overall deaths.  He meant deaths due to terrorist attacks.  Well, let's consider that.  Here's Wikipedia's list of terrorist attacks between 1990 and 2013.  Wikipedia lists 43 terrorist attacks in the US since 1990.  Of these, 15 were between 1993 and 2000, 16 were between 2001 and 2008, and 12 were between 2009 and April 2013.  So, the overall rate of terrorist attacks has not actually dropped.

More pertinently, Krauthammer meant terrorist attacks by Islamic terrorists.  Well, sorting through that aforesaid list, according to Wikipedia, here are the terrorist attacks by Muslims since 1990::

• 1993: CIA shooting
• 1993: World Trade Center bombing
• 1994: Brooklyn Brindge shooting
• 1997: Empire State Building shooting
• 2000: New York Bronx Molotov coctail attack
• 2001: World Trade Center / Pentagon attacks
• 2002: LA airport shooting
• 2006: UNC Chapel Hill attack
• 2006: Seattle Jewish Federation attack
• 2009: Arkansas recruiting office attack
• 2009: Fort Hood attack
• 2013: Boston Marathon attack 

OK, so we had five attacks in 8 years pre 9/11 and 5 attacks in the 8 years post 9/11.  Let's see.  Aha!  That means the rate was the same.

How about the number of deaths?  Well, if you exclude 9/11 itself then there were 10 people killed in the terrorist attacks in the eight years pre-9/11 and there were 17 deaths in the eight years post 9/11 (which does not include the Boston bombing).  Hmmm ... still not safer!

It is undoubtedly true that threats from Islamic terrorists may have changed and it is entirely possible (and indeed I would speculate probable) that the US security is significantly better able to intercept and stop these threats now.  However, that merely means that the defense and security mechanism is more tuned to the threats.  To argue that we are actually safer would require that the probability of attacks or the probability of death from attacks to have been materially lowered.  There does not seem to be any evidence that such a decrease in risk has occurred.