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> Terrorists are like airliner crashes. Sure, the odds are low, but when an airliner goes wrong, it tends to go wrong BADLY

And they make the headlines, not because of the numbers of casualties, but because of it's "unusuality". Ie plane crashes make the news because they are uncommon, terrorist events make the news because they are uncommon.

The car crashes (note the plural) every day generally don't make the national news unless they are particularly newsworthy (involve a "celebrity" or an unusually large number of people, or involve children) simply because they aren't really that newsworthy - they happen every day.

> 20 years ago, three guys killed 160+ with a rent-a-truck and homemade ANFO. 14 years ago, some 20 guys killed 3,000 in a single morning

So you have to go back "lots of years" in order to get large numbers. More recently, the US had it's own awakening moment with their 9/11 attacks when a few thousand died. Yes I know it's easy to write that "only" a few thousand died, but I'm not trying to belittle the impact of each of those deaths on their friends and families. But what are the average figures for deaths on US roads per year ? I think the numbers are similar - in the UK I believe it's around 3000/year killed on the roads.

There's a similar effect in most areas of life. Take electricity supplies for example. Some people like to harp on about how "safe" renewables like wind and hydro are, and how "dangerous" nuclear is. But look at the real figures and nuclear is actually quite safe - with actually at least (if not more) harm caused by over-zealous "we must be seen to be doing something" reactions from officials. Look at Fukashima for example, people love to link to the videos of gas explosions blowing the cladding off the building - and calling them "nuclear" explosions. Yes hardly anyone has been, or is likely to be, harmed by anything "nuclear". People overlook the terrible fact that around 20,000 people died in the tsunami which left huge areas contaminated with raw sewage, chemicals, oils, rotting animals and human body parts, and ... And in the "must be seen to be doing something", officials still keep large areas closed off "because - it's nukular innit" in spite of the fact that the harm of keeping people from where they consider home is almost certainly significantly higher than the potential harm from "nuclear".

And then look at the figures for renewables. People like to point out how "safe" renewables are - yet lookup Banqiao Reservoir Dam and you'll find that it's failure (together with some others in the same area at the same time) caused an estimates 171,000 deaths - yes that's one hundred and seventy one thousand deaths. That's just one incident.

The problem is that people have been conditioned - deliberately by those with an axe to grind - to believe that "nuclear == mushroom clouds" and "renewables == as cuddly as your kid flying a kite on the beach". And their attitude to risk is significantly modified by these "beliefs".

The same holds for terrorism. When anything "terrorist" happens - it's splashed across the global media out of all proportion. The media do it simply because "it sells papers/airtime", but IMO such large scale coverage is aiding the terrorists by pushing a distorted view of the risk. Since the Paris attack, there's been the view cultured that (for example) going to a concert or sports match is "risky" - and of course the state authorities would like people to believe that because it means they can sell you protection from that risk.

But go and lookup some statistics - I don't have the time right now, though some are easy to find. I can recall a few incidences of non-terrorist events that have caused considerably larger numbers of casualties. Whether it's crown mismanagement that leads to crushing (the truth now coming out about Hillsborough, 98 deaths, 766 injuries), stadium seating collapsing, building roofs collapsing, walls falling on crowds (Heysel, 39 killed, 600 injured), stages collapsing (Indiana State Fair, 7 killed, 58 injured). And not to miss out the recent deaths at Mecca (over 700 killed).

So that puts terrorist murders (for that is what we should really call them) into something of a perspective.

TL;DR version. These proposals are a knee jerk "we must be seen to be doing something" response to what is actually a minor problem when compared to everything else we should be bothered about. If we accept the logic in doing this, then we are aiding the terrorists and admitting defeat - giving them exactly what they want which is to change the way we live at their beckoning. To be perfectly honest, the sort of world where terrorism is "solved" by such measures isn't the sort of world I'd want to live in. I'm sure there was no terrorism in "1984", and I don't recall any in "V" either. I recommend watching the latter and looking for the parallels with where things are currently heading.