Much more pernicious is the promise of enhanced safety provided by increased surveillance and other methods that result in diminution of civil rights. That promise of safety, elusive as it may be, is apparently quite seductive.
We need to apply some reasonable assessment of risk here, just as we naturally do in many undertakings - booking a flight, for example. The chance of a New Zealander encountering terrorism at home is smaller than winning Lotto.
The last act of genuine terrorism on New Zealand soil occurred in 1985 with the bombing and sinking of the Rainbow Warrior by an erstwhile ally, the French. No small irony that the attack was on a Greenpeace ship, a staunch defender of the environment.
The actual risk - one that is palpable, present and incalculable - is to democracy itself and the threat is not from some alien without but, as often the case, from within.
When moderates speak of the need to balance security with protection of civil rights, they offer a false choice ... a Hobson's choice, as if these were equivalents.
That's implicit in the notion of balance, of something that can be weighed or measured.
Democracy and its corollary rule of law is neither inevitable nor invincible. It is, in fact, quite fragile. It is not to be confused with electoral process, merely a necessary but insufficient ingredient.
The security mechanisms, short-term fixes, are - in the long run - subject to abuse as mechanisms of control of dissidence. Significantly, the security apparatus is unreliable as each new terrorist episode proves.
This week's shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, which resulted in three deaths, among them a police officer, was properly described by that state's Governor as an act of terrorism. What does that say about the other mass shootings?
That the United States, with its massive resources, its willingness to subvert constitutional safeguards, and its militarised police forces, cannot guarantee the safety of its citizens against the occasional - but still relatively rare, thank goodness - act of terrorism.
It does come down to this: Benjamin Franklin's famous aphorism that he who would trade liberty for security deserves (and will get) neither was not intended as setting up an equivalence.
The search for security is a chase after uncertainty and a will o' the wisp; the struggle for liberty is never-ending, but it can never be attained by people who allow themselves to live in fear and thereby give the terrorists the victory they cannot otherwise achieve.
There is paradox here. The loudest voices calling for vengeance, war and simultaneously dismantling the safeguards of the democratic state in favour of the surveillance state are actually dragging in the Trojan Horse of authoritarianism that assures the terrorists of their victory.
I do understand that the helplessness engendered by terrorism provides impetus to those who promise (falsely, I believe) to provide safety in the security state - even though the genuine bulwarks of safety are already here in our democratic processes.
In the darkest days of the 1930s, faced with the Great Depression and looming war, with democracy under threat everywhere, including the US, President Roosevelt declared: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
Courageous words, well worth repeating today.
-Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
