5 comments on how to stop the lone-wolf terrorist

1.

A lone-wolf terrorist cannot always be stopped. A man can get a knife – he can grab one from the kitchen – go out the street and stab another man or woman. A man can find a gun – buy one, steal one, own one – and go on an unexpected rampage, with no warning signs. If the man is determined enough, if he is strong enough to efficiently use his knife, if he knows how to use a gun, he might kill some people. If no warning signs were available to detect in advance, some damage is unavoidable. In such case, the only questions are how much time it takes for someone, anyone, to stop him and how much time it takes for life to go back to normal when the attack is over.

Stopping a person who kills with a knife or a gun is a scary thing to do. The natural instinct of all people when such a thing happens is to flee. But reality is simple: the more people flee, the longer the attack continues. Citizens who have the courage to try and do something – throw something, hit the attacker with something – can make an attack much less deadly. If lone-wolf attacks become more common in a certain society, that society needs to find within itself the courage to stand up to attackers. It can do so by making civilians readier to respond, and it can do it by having more security forces in public places, ones that are ready to rapidly respond to attacks. In Orlando, it took a very long time for the police to respond to the attack. In an era of lone-wolf attacks – namely, an era in which reliance on prior intelligence cannot be counted on – response time is crucial.

2.

Recovery time is also crucial. Terrorism is aimed at scaring people and causing disruption to their daily lives. The less disruption, the less terrorism succeeds. When terrorism hit the Brussels airport back in March, it took several days for the place to get cleaned up, ready to run, and fully operating. That is not good. Preparing for terrorism means preparing to detect it in advance, preparing to fight it as it happens, and preparing to recover from it as the attack ends.

Recovery means: quickly identifying the dead and wounded and notifying the families. Quickly gathering the information needed at the scene and then moving to clean it up and put it back together. Last week in Tel Aviv, two gunmen killed four Israelis in the evening. The next morning Israelis were already sitting at the café where the attack took place. This is not a sign of indifference. It is a sign of preparedness – practical and mental. Cleaning up the blood, the broken glass, the physical evidence of last night's horror is the practical aspect. Getting ready to celebrate a new day where horror occurred just hours ago is the mental aspect.

3.

The lone-wolf terrorist often does give an early indication of his or her malice intentions. Thus, intelligence can still be valuable, provided that it is gathered wisely and used properly. As Noga Tarnopolsky aptly explained yesterday, quoting Israeli security experts, “to neutralize terror you need intelligence. You need to identify the target population and act; and the laws about what it is permissible to collect and what is not will need to be changed”. Israelis, she wrote, have displayed a much greater willingness than Americans to relinquish certain rights of privacy in exchange for a vigorous security régime.

I made a similar argument long ago, as I was writing how “News that the American government has been eavesdropping” to allies “prompted barely a shrug in Israel.” The difference between outraged Americans and impassive Israelis is striking, and illuminating, I wrote back then: “It is the difference between a public for whom security is largely a theoretical issue, and a public for whom defending the homeland is a perpetual concern. It is the difference between a society that is concerned for its privacy no less than its security, and a society that won’t hesitate to trade some privacy for more security.”

Will Americans ever be ready to tip the privacy-security balance in favor of more security? The answer to such a question is easy – the more lone wolfs threaten the daily lives of Americans, the readier they will be to change their laws and their priorities as needed.

4.

The question of access to guns is prominent in the American debate following the attack in Orlando. “There will always be people filled with uncontrolled rage, people who want to inflict as much devastation as they can — whether in the name of a radical Islamist ideology or simple hatred of specific groups,” writes the New York Times editorial board. “The clear solution is to make such violence as hard as possible to commit.” That is, make guns less available.

Is that the solution? As I wrote yesterday, it is and it isn't. If guns are unavailable to terrorists, they are also unavailable for those who want to defend themselves from terrorists. Citizens with guns can be a problem, or a partial solution to a problem. Provided it is the right citizens holding guns – and the wrong ones being prevented from holding guns. A longer, more thorough process of licensing prior to someone being able to own a gun would be advisable for two reasons. One – because it could potentially prevent some bad citizens from getting what they want. Two – because it could provide the authorities with extra means to collect information about bad people who want a gun.

5.

In the era of the lone wolf, some degree of profiling – a dirty term for many good reasons – is inevitable. Citizens and law enforcement officers, whether they want it or not, are going to be more cautious around members of certain groups from which lone wolves tend to emerge. The peaceful, law abiding, good natured, hate free, Muslim American might feel less comfortable because of that tendency. He or she might be subjected to more looks, more questions at the airport, more searches at the entrance to a shopping mall – if such searches become necessary in American malls as they are in Israeli malls.

If “the kind of homegrown extremism that we've all been concerned about,” as President Obama said, asserts itself more frequently and becomes a more constant feature of disruption to American civilian life, necessity is going to trump sensitivity and make profiling a reality.  Of course, the instinctive response of Americans to such a possibility is to get offended. Profiling people based on ethnicity, religion, color, and age fosters discrimination. It is an insult.

That is – unless we all agree that it is not an insult. It is simply the shortest, most efficient, most practical approach to making terrorism more difficult to carry out. It is better to officially acknowledge it, and manage it properly, than letting it become a denied, unrecognized under-the-rug, and hence unmanaged, reality.

As a relatively young male from the Middle East, who wears a beard and who often travels alone, I accept with no complain a reality in which I am subjected to searches at airports more often than old, white, Episcopalian ladies from Boston. I am not insulted. I understand that this is not a personal grudge against me but rather a necessity. It is a price that some communities have to pay more than others. Terrorism is just one more reason because of which the world is not fair.