Orlando and Self-Radicalization

I'm the kind of guy who wants solutions. And I spend a lot of time considering them. But I don't have one here.

We're seeing a new kind of terrorist. This wasn't an attack by foreign-born people who come here with a plan. By all appearances, this was an American who decided, on his own and without direction, to kill other Americans. Chattanooga, San Bernadio, Wichita, and Garland were all very comparable. Even the Paris attacks were primarily perpetrated by citizens of France and Brussels.

How do you stop an American citizen who, on his own, decides one day that God wants him to kill as many people as possible?

You can't stop the person from being here; he's a citizen with all the rights I have. Should we strip all Muslims of their civil rights? Put them in internment camps? Burn the first amendment?

You can't eliminate other grievances; many times there are none. We're dealing with people who have lived in rich countries their entire lives. They're not angry about American involvement in the middle east, or support of Israel. They want to kill Americans because they think God wants them to. We're dealing with a small fraction of Muslims, but it's still fundamentally a religious issue.

You can't stop Muslims from being exposed to radical ideas; free speech is impossible to contain even if you're trying. Do we try anyway? Pull down radical videos as soon as we find them? Have a new department of censorship? Once again burn the first amendment?

You can't disincentivize; they expect to die and go to heaven, and bring all their loved ones with them. Paradise beats any possible carrot or stick.

You can't prevent access to deadly weapons; guns are too widespread to practically eliminate, and trying would cause a civil war. If we waved a magic wand to eliminate all guns in the US, we would get less-lethal terror attacks, but I'm not sure the big-picture result would be better. You can do just as much damage with bombs, as we've seen from Christian domestic terrorists in the past.

One of the hardest security problems imaginable is an attacker who will trade his life for the target. How do you stop that when everyone is the target?

So far I have two possible solutions, and I don't like either of them.

1) Harden every target. Hire gigantic numbers of trained armed guards. I'm not sure how much that would actually help anything, but presume it does. We're talking about a million restaurants, 350,000 churches, 50,000 bars and nightclubs, 20,000 theaters, 100,000 libraries, 130,000 schools, and an uncountable number of shopping centers. Not to mention several million businesses. Call it ten million locations, each needing on average one full-time guard. If the guard makes a living wage, that's $300 billion a year just in wages, not to mention the high cost of continuing training. That would make it one of the largest areas of government expenditure. And all that assumes that the armed guards actually accomplish anything, which is far from certain.

Alternately, change our society so that a sizable fraction of the populace starts to carry a gun, all the time. Roughly a third of the US owns guns, and there are roughly 500 accidental deaths due to firearms. Supposing we triple the number of homes with guns in the US, we could reasonably expect an additional 1000 accidental deaths per year due to firearms, plus an indeterminate number of additional homicides and suicides. Supposing we just use the round 1000 additional deaths a year, to make this proposal effective we would have to prevent at least 1000 terrorist murders every year. We are nowhere near that number.

2) Prove the jihadists wrong. Self-radicalization happens when a Muslim becomes convinced they're living in the end times. But this didn't happen until recently. What has changed? The existence of ISIS, and a credible caliphate. Destroy that caliphate, prove that this is not the end of times, and self-radicalization should drop dramatically.

Obviously I'm reluctant to push this as a solution. Our invasion of Iraq was a complete disaster, as was our bombing of Libya. But those were disasters for specific reasons, chief among them that we had no plan to successfully pacify the country afterward, leading to a complete lack of order. For many Iraqis things got worse after the invasion, and that spiraled into further destabilization, leading directly to ISIS in the first place. Libya outright refused foreign intervention past the bombing, apparently preferring their hellhole to foreign soldiers. Because we acted without a full plan, things got worse.

Now consider, for those living under ISIS, is it even possible for things to get worse?

There are other concerns, of course. If we go to total war on ISIS, in the short term we make their prophecies look more accurate. (You know, before all the jihadists in Syria are dead. So the very short term.) How many new domestic terrorist events does that precipitate, vs. how many does it prevent?

What if, at the same time, we offer free travel for any would-be jihadists who wish to go fight us in Syria? These aren't exactly brilliant strategic thinkers; if we ask nicely, they might just line up politely to be incinerated...

And honestly, on some level, it just seems... right. We have the largest military the planet has ever seen. ISIS is the most evil force the world has seen in decades, and they are literally asking us to come fight them. For decades we've invaded places for business interests, or revenge, or in the name of ideologies that we don't even hold half the time. Can we use our amazing powers to do violence just because, for once, it's the right thing to do?