In the wake of the horrific bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday, many are wondering how this tragedy could have been prevented and what lessons to draw for the future. Marc Ambinder explains why we shouldn’t rush to add new layers of security.
“Asking for perspective the day after we all witnessed something as horrifying as a man being wheeled away from a bombing scene with his legs blown off may not seem sensitive, but it would be harmful to say, as one former network anchor man who shall remain nameless, that the innocence we feel at large public events is somehow lost. Maybe for him. But for the rest of us, we’ve come to incorporate the threat of something bad happening into our calculus. We rightly reason that the probability of an attack is extremely low. And police departments and security companies do a generally good job of hardening targets. That does not, and will not change.”
“What will produce more fear is if the media tells us that we must be afraid of sporting events from now on. Never will a security cordon be perfectly impenetrable. Let’s figure out what happened before we make any assumptions. We do not need metal detectors at the entrances to malls.”
