You have made your points tango. I have a right to my opinions, too, and you can't change my mind now about doing something about terrorism. We are in a huge war in the middle east and our soldiers are there to help save us from terrorism. If we weren't trying to wipe out ISIS there would be more of them killing us. Didn't you see all the beheadings they did? Even letting one or two terrorists into our country can mean the death of hundreds or thousands as was with 9/11.
I'm not trying to change anyone's mind about doing something about terrorism. The important thing is to do something useful rather than something that looks good as a newspaper headline, and keeping the threat of terrorism in perspective. Nobody thinks twice about getting in their car despite being far more likely to be killed in a road traffic accident than being killed by a terrorist. And if we focus too much on something we expect to be able to spot by eye (e.g. the idea that "A Muslim" is a young man with brown skin and a beard) we're more likely to be fooled by people who match the threat but not the visual appearance. A Muslim could be a young man with white skin and a beard.
I know they behead hostages, and I'm not trying to say that what they do is anything other than atrocious. But the fact remains that the number of people killed by terrorism is minute compared to the number of people killed in road traffic accidents, among other hazards we don't even consider when going about our day-to-day lives. Even the number of people killed on 9/11 was far less than the number of people killed on the roads in 2001, yet outside of immediate circles nobody remembers the untold casualties of our roads.
It's also important to make sure that we do something that doesn't fan the flames. Terrorists generally don't want to restrict their activities to only hit military targets - they want people to be afraid so they target areas where innocent civilians are likely to be gathering. But if we damage or destroy innocent facilities we can't really write off the deaths of foreign civilians as little more than collateral damage if we want to maintain the moral high ground if our own civilians are attacked.
At the same time we also need to be careful that we don't end up doing the terrorists' jobs for them. As it stands if a terrorist group manages to pull off a single attack the people start clamoring for the government to Do Something To Protect Us, and willingly surrender their hard won freedoms in the hope of getting some protection from the (largely undefined) group that represents the bogeyman of the day. So if we close the borders and don't let anyone in at all, as a security precaution, we can kiss goodbye to large parts of the tourist industry. As jobs are lost in tourism the families affected cut back on their spending which causes further economic losses, and so a single successful attack has its impact amplified by a frightened population.
To use an analogy, if we are bitten on the arm by a mosquito the solution is to use antihistamines to stop the itching and insect repellant to make it less likely to happen again. Cutting our arm off to stop the itching and make sure it's never bitten again works in theory but is a totally disproportionate and unhelpful response even though it guarantees a stop to the itching and guarantees the arm won't be bitten again.
