Terrorist attacks - Is it really possible to stop it in an open democracy?

 I really can't remember how many times in my life, I've watched the news and seen stories of terrorist outrages. Whist, at the time of writing, it is not clear what inspired the train knifeman to go on the rampage, regardless of what his motivation, the effect is pretty much the same. People are worried.

In a country such as the UK, where we are not a police state, the difficult question is whether there is actually any answer to the issue of random terror attacks. It is a matter of public record that it is almost unknown for attacks to be perpetrated by people who are not on the Police radar in some form. When we catch terrorists, we don't summarily execute them, or string them up with piano wire, as happened in Germany under Adolf Hitler. They normally go through a legal process and generally get sentences, that often with remission, most of us think are far too short.

Whenever there is an outrage, there are calls for all manner of measures, such as the re-introduction of Capital punishment, and all manner of impossible to implement security measures. On several occasions in London, I missed being blown up by minutes. I was on the number 30 behind the one blown up on Russel Street. I walked across the concourse of Victoria station about two minutes before the IRA detonated a bomb there (which nearly killed a friend of mine), I was supposed to be having a beer with a mate in Borough Market on the night that was attacked, but he had the flu.

It is odd that it the people I know who are most spooked by these attacks, were not the ones who work in the areas attacked. I saw someone suggesting that all stations should have 'knife arches' at all stations. There are over 2,500 train stations in the UK. To have knife arches at all of these would cost hundreds of millions of pounds, as they would need to be manned. If you only have them at busy stations, terrorists will simply find less busy ones. Even if you did, they'd then target schools, churches or God knows what else. I am not sure Capital punishment is a deterrent to a Jihadi terrorist, who wants to lose their life or a person who has severe mental illness and is not thinking straight. It may make a few of us happy to see someone hanging for such crimes, but it's use as a deterrent is, to my mind, limited.

Ultimately the best way an open democracy can deal with terrorism is to just get on and do what we always do. The chances of getting attacked by a mad knifeman are tiny. There are 24,000 trains a day running in the UK. if you are going to die travelling in the UK, you are far more likely to die on the roads. The bottom line is that we can't prevent attacks, but we can make it clear to the perpetrators that they are pointless, as they will change nothing.