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Originally Posted by photon
I'm not talking about motivations. If people are injured or killed by violence, the mental path they took to arrive at the point of being able to commit that violence doesn't matter to the victims.
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But of course it's crucially important to our moral reaction, as well as to our practical law enforcement response. Depending on the motivations, we can either expect that it's not ever going to happen again (or won't happen frequently; there aren't a lot of people out there who think trees can tell them to do things) or that it almost certainly will.
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I'm talking about society's response and the premise that there should be an expectation of zero incidents of terrorist violence. There's no expectation that there be zero incidents of murder is there?
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So the whole tree thing was a bit of a red herring I guess? I'm just still not clear how it's related to your point, but maybe it wasn't crucial to what you were saying.
I think that there's a similar sort of expectation in the two realms - that is, I don't really think that anyone expects that we'll be able to completely eliminate all terrorist activity any more than they think we'll eliminate murder. But where there are apparent options to reduce harm, people have an expectation that those options will be looked at and if thought appropriate, implemented. I don't see a big difference here.
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A politician can campaign on reducing violent crime, but not on eliminating it altogether; everyone would see that for what it is, an empty promise to try and garner votes. Campaigning on eliminating violence from terrorism is the same, it can be reduced, but I don't think it's possible to eliminate it while having a free and open society.
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I agree, but there are things that could be done that aren't being done. Though to be fair, not all of those are governmental actions, as I think the biggest gains are to be made within Muslim communities themselves.