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The number of successful prosecutions, with guilty verdicts and jail time, on offences under whichever anti-terror statutes you're measuring for effectiveness.

If individual acts of terror are being prevented, but none of the people planning them are put in prison, and are free to walk the streets and try another plot, would you say those laws are effective? I wouldn't.

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Putting people in prison is a means to an end, not a goal itself. If anything, preventing violence without locking anyone up is even better than preventing it by keeping potential perpetrators under armed guard.

Maybe on a longer time horizon it won't work as well, but it's already been 20 years since 9/11.

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