Terrorism Congress should repeal the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, resist efforts to expand wiretapping, remove all export controls on encryption, and enact appropriations bills forbidding any executive branch official from spending money to promote the Clipper Chip. Indeed, proponents of a crackdown have often claimed that anyone who is skeptical of their exaggerated assertions must be sympathetic to the enemies of America.
Any violent crime is terrible, but terrorism is extremely rare in the United States.
The risk that any given American will be killed by a terrorist is about the same as the chance that a randomly selected high school football player will one day be a starting quarterback in the Super Bowl. One's chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is many times less than one's chance of drowning in a bathtub or being killed by a fall from scaffolding or a ladder. Accordingly, America should reject terrorism legislation that will probably not save any lives and that demands that Americans give up things far more important than bathtubs. Terrorists cannot destroy a free society, but they can scare a free society into destroying itself. In 1974 Irish Republican Army terrorists bombed pubs in Birmingham, England, killing 21 people.