I want to stress that 1. DESIRE and 3. CONNECTING TO GOAL are probably the most important functions to stop and neither of those have anything to do with weapons. If no one has a desire (motive) to commit a crime/terrorism then none will happen. And if no one connects violence with getting their desired goal then violence (crime/terrorism) is stopped.

Those two functions might be hard to measure but they cost little to implement and have better and longer lasting effects than the others. Remember that violence is often a reaction to a feeling of powerlessness. Making sure people FEEL and ACTUALLY do have OPTIONS prevents violence.

The crazed gunman type of attack want to feel power over the victims. The suicide bomber believes there is no other action that will work. And regular criminals believe that stealing or harming someone is the easiest way to get what they want.

Imagine if everything was free. I don’t mean the price but rather the real energy and material costs. It was so easy to get anything you desired that you could always have more than you could use. Why would anyone commit violence? It would be much easier to just walk away and find another place to get what you want. Feeling you have options and actually having plenty of readily available options helps with everything including reducing violence. This is just one of the benefits of Predictive Innovation and bringing Abundance into existence.

Israel realized this problem and solved it. In the 1970′s several schools were attacked by gun wielding terrorists. Israel enacted a law requiring all children to be accompanied by an armed adult. Since that law no attacks have occurred on Israeli schools.”

Not sure I buy everything in your post but the above part is a fact that I believe doesn’t get nearly enough coverage. I applaud you for bucking political correctness and mentioning this here. It really bugs me that this is not looked at as an option in our schools. Instead we do exactly the opposite of having armed “guards”. We make it completely illegal, even for those with concealed weapon permits.

Remember that you don’t have to do everything 100%. Your goal is to reduce the risk to a point that it’s not worth any more effort. And as I’ll explain in the math you can make small improvements to each piece to get big results overall.

I must stress the prevent aspect will produce the best results for the effort required. Stop desire and you stop terrorism.

Haha, I knew someone would ask me about the 75% calculation. I knew “leaving it to the student to finish” would bite me. I’ll explain it in detail but I’ll do that last because some people are turned off by math.

Teaching the Alternatives Grid.

All it takes is a book or video that can be distributed for free over the Internet. I’m currently working on a book to do that. I plan on collecting donations to cover my costs to produce it, translating into several languages and promoting it but digital distribution is free.

When it’s available please make copies and share.

Eliminating Schedules

From a personal standpoint it’s a good idea to take different routes to and from work. This breaks up your schedule and also trains you to have alternatives for avoiding traffic or to respond to some emergency.

The current schedule system most of the western world follows originated from factories 100 years ago where they didn’t have electric lights. Today people can work any time of day from home or any place in the world. The current government school systems are still based on the 100-year-old schedule. The building are only used 1/3 the time and sit empty at night and on weekends. So you could easily improve productivity and give people more options by having 16 hour or 24 hour school hours. Let parents choose which shift their students will attend or allow some sort of mix and match. Employers already have flextime for employees.

Another increasingly popular option is home schooling. Home schooling has the added benefit of better educational results plus costing less per student on top of the added security and research shows home-schooled children are better emotionally developed and “socialized” than students in large class room settings.

Still another option is tele-classes. Australia has been using these to allow children far from cities access to the same teachers. Instant messenger, Skype, Webinars, YouTube, Wikipedia and other technologies make tele-classes and other telecommuting widely available, cheap and easy.

There will still be things like concerts sporting events and church gatherings that group people together in at a known time. That is why you should improve all the steps. Security is about layers.

Math

OK, there are 5 pieces. If you have 100% likelihood of each step then that is 1 * 1 * 1 * 1 * 1 = 100% of terrorism. If you reduce the probability of anyone of those then the likelihood of the end result decreases the same amount. But if you reduce the likelihood of more than one or all of them then the results are exponential. .9 * .9 * .9 * .9 * .9 = 59% By reducing the chance of each step by 10% you’ve reduced the total chance by 41%. So, .75 * .75 * .75 * .75 * .75 = 24% chance of terrorism.

This is great because it avoids the problem of diminishing returns. The first 80% often takes 20% of the effort while the last 20% takes 80% of the effort, see Pareto_Principle

Arming Potential Victims

Firstly I didn’t say arm children, I said arm potential victims. The teachers as well as children are potential victims. Arming young children would be foolish.

College aged “children” could and should be armed. These “children” are required to register for military service in the USA so the government expects them to fight wars. There are a wide variety of weapons costing from $10 to $300. From pepper spray to a very good handgun people can be effectively and inexpensively armed. For less than the cost of an iPod a person can purchase a self-defense weapon that lasts a lifetime.

A few days of training is all that is required to teach a person to safely defend themselves with several weapons including firearms. Cheap Class or World Class

More importantly everyone doesn’t need to be armed. Just one potential victim in an attack is enough. Consider the recent Virginia Tech shooting. Two of the victims were trained military. Either of them could have easily stopped the event the second it started.

Arming people is both a deterrent and a way to stop an attack in progress.

I feel prevention is much more important. Look at the probabilities I showed you, they also work against an attacker. The math is backwards. The terrorist doesn’t want to find an armed non-victim. So if 25% of people are armed and the terrorist attacks a group of 10 people there is a 94% chance the terrorist will face an armed “non-victim” 1 – (1-.25)^10 = 94% That is a HUGE deterrent. And in the case of a terrorist attacking 10 people there are probably more people close enough to hear the shooting.

Israel didn’t arm the children, they armed the teachers. One armed teacher per 20 students was enough for Israelis to stop that type of attack. Terrorism didn’t stop but that type of attack did stop.

You don’t have to out run the bear, just the other guy.

In this case all you need to do is make it hard enough that terrorists find something else to do. And if you give them positive alternatives that are much easier that is what they will do.

Make peace cheap and easy, war expensive and difficult and show people this is true and you will get peace.

- Eliminating schedules
- Arming the children
- Teaching the Alternatives Grid to potential attackers

Those don’t seem cheap or easy to me.

I’m also interested in your source data for the claim that 25% improvements in those key motivational areas reduce all crime by 75%. How are these improvements observed and quantified?

Thanks for offering a more proactive solution to terrorism. I look forward to your replies.