Terrorism

We can’t beat terrorism. Terrorism is not an adversary that can be destroyed; terrorism is a thing that people do.

Declaring a war on terrorism is even more futile than declaring a war on drugs; drugs, at least, are tangible, and could presumably one day be destroyed completely.

We can’t beat terrorists, because every person has the potential to be a terrorist. All you have to do to be a terrorist is get a gun, a bomb, or similar, find a bunch of people, and kill them indiscriminately.

Some people believe that only evil people commit terrorism, and if we destroy evil people, there will be no more terrorism. This belief fundamentally misunderstands human nature. There is no collection of human beings who are evil; there is simply humanity, made up of all of us, and some of us choose to do evil things.

The option exists to commit an act of terrorism, of indiscriminate mass killing. We can, through governance, take some deadly weapons out of general circulation; we can learn who wants to use those weapons to kill and try to stop them; we can punish people who kill. But we cannot destroy the fact that people have the choice to kill each other.

You can’t destroy a concept. Hopefully, terrorism will someday be only a concept, known of but not used. But, even if it’s only in the abstract, terrorism will always be with us.