No substantive debate exists about whether this threat is real. The only question is: What are we going to do about it?

As a statewide elected official in Texas and as a naval intelligence officer who served during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, I believe we must continue to defeat and destroy terrorism whenever we can, wherever we find it. And that means all terrorism. Many on the left are wrong in downplaying the threat of Islamic radical terrorism, and many on the right are wrong in downplaying homegrown white-supremacist terrorism. Both are evil, both are real, and both must be confronted and conquered.

As a conservative, I especially want to charge my party to take this challenge seriously. As the heirs to Lincoln and Reagan, we can’t look the other way when people threaten our security. When President Ronald Reagan spoke to the nation following his military action against Libya after a brutal terrorist attack in 1986, he said that the Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi “counted on America to be passive. He counted wrong.”

Today, we face the same sort of challenge. By definition, conservatives know that the world is a fallen place and that evil exists. We are not naive to it. And we have historically been willing to confront this evil. We must not be passive. We must not look away. The stakes are too high, and so are the consequences.

Confronting domestic terrorism starts with speaking honestly about the threat itself. No more euphemisms, no more attempts to explain away these actions. When a terrorist tells us in his manifesto that he is killing people because of their race, we should take him at his word.

But confronting domestic terrorism also means strengthening our law-enforcement approach to the challenge it poses. I applaud the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas for announcing that the shooter will be prosecuted on domestic-terrorism charges. We should prosecute white-supremacist terrorists the exact same way we do other terrorists.

Furthermore, confronting domestic terrorism means rebuilding the bond of trust between Americans and their law-enforcement agencies. There were a great number of heroes in El Paso on Saturday, and many of them were wearing uniforms. Police officers were on the scene in El Paso in just six minutes. And, once there, they quickly detained the shooter and saved countless lives.

Being Hispanic, I appreciate that there is sometimes tension between minority communities and police officers. But police brutality is, by far, the exception and not the rule. The vast majority of police officers around the nation are heroes who, every day, are willing to risk their lives to save others. We must support these brave men and women. And we must look for ways to work more closely with them to fight domestic terrorism. The policy of “If you see something, say something” needs to be followed when people see someone acting suspiciously, regardless of who it is.