The alternatives I want to see discussed all involve cultural changes. Sometimes when I try to discuss these with people they get fixated on shifting 100% of blame onto the attackers and 0% onto culture/society/foreign policy/poverty/whatever, but assigning blame is a completely pointless activity and the question needs to be what will actually work, not what will feel good to our primitive instincts for vengeance.

Some hypothetical approaches for discussion:

- Convincing violent groups to be less violent; demonstrating that they can get more of what they want by participating in society than by attacking it (a multi-generational issue)

- Finding a place for the "lone wolf" types to feel like their needs and concerns are addressed, including mental health

- Getting first-world powers to stop purposely destabilizing other countries

- Accepting what remains of the problem as if it's a natural disaster (e.g. just as people accept or ignore the 1000x worse problem of traffic deaths)