Thoughts on the Complex Problem of Terrorism

(I started writing this piece in 2016 before Donald Trump was president. Obviously, things have changed a bit in the intervening 2+ years, but I still think it's worth contemplating the difficulty of solving the complex problem of terrorism, both imported and homegrown. I must thank Januwordy for the nudge to pick this back up.)

In The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee explains why cancer is so intractable. For decades, researchers kept trying to find a silver bullet, but cancer is not one disease, and it won't succumb to a single cure. Genetically, multiple mutations often must occur for a small tumor to grow, metastasize, and become life-threatening. Multiple parts of an extremely complex system have to fail simultaneously for it to spiral out of control. Accordingly, treatment for any sort of metastatic cancer is generally multifaceted. No single part of the treatment by itself will generally send a case into remission.

I develop software for a living. It's been my observation that for things to go horribly wrong often requires multiple problems to manifest themselves simultaneously. You account for A, B, C, and D, but fail to account for E and F. Still, when E does show up, the system might well not fail, or might fail in an obvious but rather innocuous way, because it requires other problems to also manifest at the same time before the system will fail in a spectacular, expensive way. Complex systems are like that.

Similarly, as we consider how to respond to climate change (the clock is ticking), we can't be fooled into thinking that one approach will solve the problem. Everything we might do, from reducing energy usage, to increasing our use of renewable energy, to leaving fossil fuels in the ground, to climate engineering, can only be considered a partial remedy. All that and more will be necessary. It's an extraordinarily hard political problem, and sacrifices will need to be made all over the place to many established systems and ways of life if we are to get things under control.

So it is with gun violence, in all its many forms. Guns in America are part of arguably the most diverse, complex society on Earth, with people of all economic, cultural, religious, and political persuasions who (or whose ancestors) hail from everywhere imaginable. We live in rural and urban settings, in diverse communities as well as homogeneous ones. Our constitutional history has given rural residents outsized influence on the political discourse, making a rural/urban compromise less likely. We have partially melted together in this huge pot, yet often retain many elements of our ancestors' cultures for many generations. Precisely because we are a highly diverse, complex society, there is no perfect solution to the problem of guns in America, one remedy which will prevent every potential bad guy from causing mayhem with guns. If the solution to gun violence in all its forms was easy, we'd have solved it long ago.

How does this relate to terrorists bent on doing mayhem? Many things have to line up "just so" before a potential terrorist can do great harm:

• He needs to develop intent. We say he must become "radicalized." Nobody is born with a malfunctioning terrorism gene.
• He might need to get into the country, though as we've seen elsewhere, that is certainly not required. We (used to) have a tradition of welcoming people from all over ("Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."), in part because we are a country of immigrants and realize that on balance immigrants have been a positive force in our society.
• He needs to identify potential targets.
• He needs to escape detection, often for months or years.
• He needs to acquire or make the necessary weapons and learn how to use them, again, without making anyone suspicious — and without killing himself in the process.

Tackling the problem of terrorism (here and abroad) in all its many forms will require multiple, simultaneous approaches, none of which will be perfect, all of which will require compromise. A wall on the southern border won't be sufficient (or even necessary, most people would argue). You can't build walls around all the targets (power plants, shopping malls, government buildings, electrical grids, water supplies, sporting events — the list is endless). You can't identify all the proto-terrorists when they are still teenagers. You can't prevent all the proto-terrorists from making contact with groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda. You certainly can't shoot them all. You can't find and decrypt your way into every hidden conversation. You can't keep all the AR-15s out of every possible terrorist's hands. You'll never develop and deploy perfect mental health screening processes. (Many terrorists, whether ISIS foot soldiers or homegrown white nationalists, are likely not mentally ill, anyway.) You can't expect that a one-size-fits-all approach to gun access is going to be right for Chicago, Illinois and Pleasant Ridge, Maine. And, perhaps most of all, whatever you do, you can't go trampling on our liberties, not just the right to bear arms, but our right to privacy, our right to assemble, to travel, or to pursue that sometimes elusive notion of happiness.

For those reasons and more, expecting a single approach to solve the problem is simply a pipe dream, yet that seems exactly like what our political discourse has become. Ignoring any approach — especially without performing any sort of risk/reward analysis — which might contribute to a solution in some small way is also foolish. Sure, let's work on our mental health systems, but let's also try and figure out ways to make it harder for bad people to get assault rifles. Perhaps there are better ways to protect our southern border other than a wall (in whatever form Trump envisions it). In the presence of such a complex problem, you must attack it in multiple, incomplete ways, on multiple fronts, and keep at it, searching for new ways to try to bring it to heel. More background checks won't be enough, but they will help. Better mental health screening won't be enough, but it will help. Stronger immigrant scrutiny won't be enough, but it will help. You'll need all that and more. Much more.

Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to have their head examined.