It isn’t that terrorism, or gun deaths, are unimportant; or that status quo policies are obviously correct; or that those who want to do more are necessarily incorrect; or that it is wrong to point to costs of inaction when making one’s case for action. The problem with these arguments is the implication that disagreements about what policies to pursue are rooted in some people caring enough to stop children from dying horribly, and others not so much. In fact, there are deep disagreements about the likely effects of many policies. And while the willingness to adopt some policies even though dead children will result is real, it is also universal; if you favor allowing cars to drive faster than 25 miles per hour, or allowing kids to ride in them, then you are willing to say that a certain amount of deaths are the price we pay to live as we want.
Unless you are willing to mandate tracking chips in everyone’s bodies, so that counterterrorism authorities can know the locations of all people at all times—and forbid the purchase of fertilizer, pressure cookers, bolts, and knives, all common terrorist weapons—then you too are unwilling to take measures that would stop an undetermined number of civilians from dying horribly, and you believe that “a certain amount of terrorism is just the price we have to pay to live the way we want to live.” [...]
For many Americans, myself included, the Iraq War was not a counterterrorism success. It was a conflict that killed many more Americans than died on September 11, 2001; and the instability that it spawned was a major root cause of the rise of ISIS. The bipartisan consensus against more ground invasions in the Middle East is not rooted in an unwillingness to make the necessary sacrifices to reduce terrorism; it reflects a belief that the Iraq War seems to have increased rather than reduced global terrorism.
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