@engineer,
Muslims attack and murder innocents in Paris. Muslims attack and kill innocents in San Bernadino, and this is only two of the latest such attacks (for all I know I missed one that happened someplace in Africa). And this is right after our Commander in Chief tells us that ISIS is contained and that Global Warming is a bigger threat than terrorism.
Just this week the entire LA school district was shut down because of a terrorist threat. I'm not sure how they determined it was fraudulent (did they catch the person making it) Or was the action enough to forestall an attack? Either way the fact is that it was very possible for such a threat to have been real and if an attack had taken place, how many Americans would have been shocked?
Yes, of course your odds of being killed by a terrorist are very slim, but when it can happen anywhere and at any time, and you no longer trust the government to keep you safe, there is bound to be fear an anxiety. You can tell people all day long that it's irrational, but it's not.
The fear and anxiety people feel when they get up every day is not based on a probability calculation. It might be great if it were so, but clearly it is not.
If you are going to tell everyone everything is fine, everything is under control, you have nothing to worry about then you had better do a good job proving this to be the case. A lot better than our current leaders are doing.
Of course the government can't stop every terrorist attack, and leaders should not be telling everyone not to set foot outside their doors, but even Trump isn't doing that.
We're told that we are xenophobes, racist or scared rabbits if we don't want 10,000 Syrian refugees allowed into the country. At the same time the Director of the FBI is telling us the government can't properly vet all the refugees that would be allowed in. Even worse we find that our government is so goddamned PC that it won't let it's agencies check the Facebook pages of prospective immigrants because they're worried about "civil rights groups" (Read unindicted co-conspirator CAIR) and "bad press" (Read NY Times). The woman who helped her husband kill 14 and wound 17 Americans in California made her sentiments clear on Facebook. Could the slaughter have been stopped if a government worker wasn't prohibited from doing something that I'm pretty sure most Americans assumed was being done? We'll never know, but is there any wonder that a large segment of the population doesn't trust our government to keep them safe?
Until the FBI Director goes before congress and tells them we can properly vet 10,000 Syrian refugees, we shouldn't let any in, and that's not irrational, it's common sense.
