Connecting a few dots here…

Violent Islamic terrorists and often-violent Black Lives Matter hangers-on are self-organizing through peer-to-peer networks, and as a result, they can strike quicker and faster than governments can manage. Terrorists are agile, while the blue-state model of government is not. Terrorist live in a post-industrial world while our first responders still hobble around in the outmoded, industrial-age shackles of centralized, top-down planning and strategy.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. Thanks to the empowerment of the Internet and the smartphone, we are becoming less and less reliant on central government for how we live our lives. Why, therefore, can’t we use peer-to-peer networking and decentralized response to our advantage? Just as Uber and AirBnB turn our consumer goods into something that helps others, we can turn the smartphone and the concealable defensive pistol into something that protects ourselves and others. We have smartphone apps that can show us the stupid places where stupid people are doing the stupid things that might get us in trouble, and we have apps that will summon help from our friends if we chose to ignore the warning signs and go there anyways or if bad things happen to us despite all our planning. We can carry a portable, concealable means of defending ourselves and our loved ones from lethal force and also carry a portable, concealable means of keeping people alive if the worst happens and lethal force is used against us.

Nature has shown us that the best way to defeat a non-localized attack is with a non-localized response. Our bodies react to the threats of infection and disease with a scattered and yet networked response of white blood cells and other defense mechanisms. The time is long overdue for society to empower a dispersed response to the dispersed threat of modern-day terrorism.

Power to the people. All the people.