The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack that paralyzed an entire metro region for nearly a month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks

Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.

Maybe because your base assumption is wrong: there are not many of them.

Perhaps writing this reply makes me one of those people as well.

edit: Votes on this one have been a wild ride.

We are not good at evaluating the less flashy risks to life. Wearing a seat belt saves a lot more lives than checking shoes at the airport, but we'll fight the seat belt a lot more.

~7 billion people aren't stupid. They just don't share your prioritization of whatever the societal issues you perceive to be most important today are. This trope is just a back handed way to call everyone who doesn't agree with you stupid, or some variation thereof.

In any case, you're either missing the overarching point (the charitable assumption) or you don't want to fight my point head on so you're nitpicking that my examples aren't good enough (the less charitable assumption).

Of the same sort of nature as masking during a pandemic:

Vaccinations, requiring docs to wear gloves during surgery, etc.

In this same fantasy universe jack-booted government thugs are beating up people who don’t wear seat belts or who mislabel the nutritional contents on a package of cheese, except that’s just not what ever actually happens in the real world. These kinds of laws can be appropriate when they make society better for us all.

To that point, anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans at this point than terrorists could ever have hoped to. You might consider that when attempting to understand why people are seemingly so hard-pressed to get laws requiring their countrymen (and women) to do the literal bare minimum to protect the lives of their neighbors.

That's a fallacy in itself, however I think there's definitely some merit to both sides here.

>Can we kindly stop using hyperbole... anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans

I've certainly never met any neo-Nazis. Not to say they don't exist, but if they are truly as common as I've been told, I think I'd have encountered some.

As some who had been lucky enough to live many years in both rural Florida and urban California, I can tell you beyond a doubt people are mostly (99%) reasonable, and mostly the same, they are just acting on different priorities, beliefs, and data :)

And yet, actual fascist governments have come to power even in nominally democratic countries.

People might only be "reasonable" when left to their own devices but there could always come a day when propaganda, sectarianism and social turmoil gets so out of hand that people don't see so reasonable anymore.

Now you might think the threshold for an "extreme number" is much higher than drawing this type of crowd, but there are enough people for whom that is a big deal, that it makes for compelling news that gets views. Way too many for me, that's for sure.

I also happen to know a lot people who have the same ideology that he have, on some discord servers, probably less sharpened and less cultivated (i mean, you've got to read a bit of Nietzsche if you want to argue in good faith with this ideology). I'd say they are proto-fascist, or proto-nazi. And actually, a lot of people i see on the internet called neo-nazi are in fact proto-nazi. It's interesting, because i've seen old TV interviews of 60s and 70s philosophical debate, i've read old books, and they were much, much more philosophically advanced than the current debates are.

By the way, i use nazism to make a small distinction with "usual" fascism. To me, nazis empathize more on personnal success than "regular" fascists, who are more deterministic (genes, culture makes more difference than effort and good will). I worked that out with my self-proclaimed fascist friend, if you disagree i'd like a criticism of the idea.

You could have met plenty and not known it. Or your sample size of acquaintances doesn't include people who frequent 4chan.

So neither lone wolf or low effort.

My guess is that crazy, extremely radicalized people are not competent at carrying out high impact attacks. Also, very few of them actually want to do such things.

The media overreports on how radical these people are. There's very few. However if COVID restrictions keep pushing forward I think that may change. Many people are at their breaking point right now.

I'm fully vaccinated and I've already decided I'm never going to wear a mask again and avoid stores that actually enforce mask rules (most don't, even if they put labels on doors mandated by the state).

They are extremely common, except the main stream "liberal" media's definition of "radicalized" and "attack" doesnt include the most common incidents. If "radicalized" means brown, yes, it isnt common.

If "radicalized" could be expanded to literally hundreds of incidents of ethno-religious-nationalist crazies who kill with guns -- it is actually really common in the US. Except whenever this happens, people instead just talk about how perps were "deeply disturbed" and needed help, rather than classifying it as "attack" or "terror"

Keep voting.

(And yes, the card works for US too, but there is no Canada-only option, and that’s primarily why I got it).

Or school shootings. That seem to result in no change except additional loss of innocent lives.

Personally I am far more concerned by the rent/steal truck and mow down pedestrians mode that we have seen in France and Germany. You might be able to do more about gun safety. You can't really prevent a madman from driving up on the sidewalk deliberately and almost any person can rent a van.

But why kill? Why not attach several 20W lasers to a drone and fire them up on a busy bridge/road? Living in suffering is a worse fate.

Won't do much good when the controls are hijacked from terra. This narrative on 9/11 being played on this thread is poppycock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4Zj1fnGtjk

Basic combat training and paramedic abilities, disaster recovery and such associated procedures.

This would create a tighter bond between citizens and improve communities ability to look after one-another.

If everyone handles those situations steadfastly, terror won’t work.

Another benefit is less reliance on national guard to handle climate crisis like hurricanes, fires, and floods.

Those are very different things. Not every soldier is taught hand-to-hand combat. Not every civil service volunteer is taught to handle a weapon. And basic first aid training is almost universal already. More lives could probably be saves by everyone being trained in basic mental health and de-escalation techniques.

And 99% of those would fear lawsuit.

The other side of the coin is that we should be focusing left-of-bang, preventing terrorism much earlier.

You didn't answer the question by the way.

But most situations that currently result in someone getting shot can be resolved less violently, as demonstrated by the lack of firearms carried or desired by the majority of UK cops.

A culture shift isn’t an overnight thing, but better worlds are possible.

Edit to fix bad quote of “well regulated militia.”

Honestly, you’re going to have bad apples no matter what. But what about the rest of the citizens? How can they respond to disaster scenarios without training?

Domestic terrorism is the same thing as abroad terrorism, except one uses patriotism as an ideology, the other uses religion.

I Russia, despite a nominal ban, you can buy a gun on the vegetable market, but nobody seem to be going, and shooting people out of a sudden other that 2-3 freak accidents per year.

Being murdered in a banal armed robbery is a by far bigger risk.

> Basic combat training and paramedic abilities, disaster recovery and such associated procedures.

... Military training teaches none of those, so far as I'm aware, except maybe the first. But even then, you're getting training on a rifle, which is not the most likely firearm a civilian would be carrying.

As a non-car driver, it stood out to me at the time that all the events occurred on the road, though of course I had no idea of the actual mechanism.

If your response to terrorism is a year of forced military training I can assure you the terror already won.

What if its a 20 year community involvement?

Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.

Except that it literally doesn't. We know from public verifiable stats that people who own a gun end up hurting themselves or their family several orders of magnitutde more often than defending against an attacker or actually using it for self defense. It happens, but the numbers clearly point that it's massively ineffective for that purpose.

>>Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.

You mean because people on HN frequently believe in the power of statistical analysis and logical thinking when it comes to deciding when something is worth doing or not?

I was thinking it absolutely does, unless everyone from more than 3ft away starts shooting.

Doubly so if we're talking knives or other sidearms.

Sikh logic, wildly underrated.

If someone is doing massive damage...cornered people in a restaurant and is shooting them one by one. Someone can respond to that. Youre going to hear it and see it. Not every scenario is going to play out perfectly but at least theres mitigation on the table.

[0] because if you actually knew they were bad guys before you gave them such training you could stop them before they fire a single shot

"Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato reported that the hijacker slipped into the cockpit with a package which could have been a bomb when flight attendants opened the cockpit door, and the pilots acted according to the international rules in the matter and did what the hijacker wanted."

Pilot also can check camera and deny the open.

So having a successful takeover depends on multiple failures at same time... chernobyl happened so its not impossible but much less likely then before.

At this point id be more worried about pilots or malware on flight computers.

200 people lost their life in the crash of Germanwings 9525 on March 24, 2015, but this is not classified as a terrorist attack so it doesn't really count for anything.

However, it is the direct consequence of the so-called security procedures implemented the world over; those 200 people are victims of "security".

Furthermore, what's to stop suicide pilot murdering co-pilot behind a locked door?

What’s to stop anyone from murdering anyone anywhere?

happy?

EDIT post downvotes: what I mean is that even without a lock on the cockpit to prevent their copilot from entering, it seems difficult to prevent a determined pilot from crashing a plane.

"The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls...The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

> Robin said that when the captain left the cockpit, possibly to use the toilet, Lubitz locked the door, preventing anyone from entering. The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls. The captain requested re-entry using the intercom; he knocked and then banged on the door, but received no response. The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion.

This seems like a pretty direct consequence to me. Similar to how an ultra isloated air-gapped environment with only one-way networking[0] would mean that the ops people couldn't easily stop e.g an ransomware attack in its tracks when detected. It's a cost/consequence of having the isolated network in the first place.

(If there was some magic code that always opened the cockpit door, then that could be coerced out of someone, yielding the system almost pointless)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network

With a bathroom on their side of the door, and a packed lunch.

We could keep going I think: there are numerous downsides to maintaining an egress unreachable from the cabin and, given the ability to lock down existing doors, few superior benefits to justify it.

Well try to use your imagination - them and their sleeping compartment would also be in there.

> or in the event of incapacity?

Etc.

The shoe bomber FAILED because it's pretty fucking obvious if someone is trying to light a shoe on fire.

We don't need the security theater of taking our shoes off. It needs to stop.

This kind of argument is honestly a big part of why the theater is still in place. People keep making poorly thought through arguments about why we don't need it. Those arguments are inevitably shot down, and everyone remembers that rather than thinking about it for themselves.

edit: but agreed - point being we know now if a plane is hijacked, there's very little chance of it coming down peacefully.

4th plane. The third plane hit the Pentagon.

At some point, the cost-benefit ratio falls apart.

You don't need most.

Flight 93 demonstrates that the "sit down and be quiet while the hostage negotiators work" approach is dead for a while.

The underwear bomber was tackled and subdued by fellow passengers.

If it's alleged el qaeda, and their "billions of dollars in funding" they would've just raised an army, and razed the place.

If someone needs on a principle to have the plane shot out of the sky, there are way dumber, and more sure ways to do that than trying to get a bomber on board.

If we want to prevent hijacking of planes for terrorism purpose, then we'll need to go deeper and fix the root cause of extremism which required tons of focused effort, probably tackling seemly intractable problems. Not spend billions upon billions more on likely ineffectual screening procedure and tools to satisfy the surveillance state.

My sense is that there is nothing they could say. Hijack a plane, a bunch of men are going to attack you. That's it.

I'm not especially brave or fearless or anything. But if you back me into a corner with no way to survive, then I'll fight back like a caged, starving rat.