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People attend a gathering in honor of the victims of the Paris attacks at Washington Square Park in New York City. Photograph: Li Muzi/Xinhua Press/Corbis
People attend a gathering in honor of the victims of the Paris attacks at Washington Square Park in New York City. Photograph: Li Muzi/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Should Americans fear an attack like those in Paris?

This article is more than 8 years old

Counter-terrorism experts largely agree that the US doesn’t face the same risks as Europe, though the Paris attack showed the reach of Isis extremists

Four days after the worst European terrorist attack in a decade and a day after extremist militants vowed to attack Washington, should Americans fear an attack like those that happened in Paris?

Counter-terrorism experts largely agree that the US does not face the same risks as Europe, even though two weeks of international attacks – 129 dead in France, 224 dead on a Russian passenger jet leaving Egypt, 43 dead in Lebanon – have forced intelligence analysts and administration officials to concede that they underestimated the reach of Islamic State extremists.

How is the US different?

Facing the latest incarnation of terrorism, the US has at least two advantages it has counted on for centuries: geography and strict travel restrictions. Travel between the US and the Middle East has always been markedly more difficult than with Europe. Since the early 1900s – then spurred by fears of anarchist terrorism – the US has poured huge amounts of money and policy into screening, security and surveillance.

The US also has a long history of cooperation with Mexican and Canadian border authorities, forcing people to either pass through customs or across terrain so inhospitable it has killed hundreds and pushed thousands into border patrol custody.

“There are oceans between us and Isis,” former White House official Heather Hurlburt told the Guardian. “That sounds kind of dumb, but when you’re talking about logistically sophisticated attacks it’s non-trivial.”

By contrast, only a few miles of sea separate Europe from the Syrian conflict and the substantially open borders of the European Union have made coping with the movement of 750,000 refugees unpredictable and politically fraught.

The refugee crisis compounds security dilemmas for European security agencies which must sift thousands of clues to find any hint of threats, and operate with tiny resources when compared to the US’s security agencies – the Department of Homeland Security alone has a $40bn budget.

“Post-9/11 the US really tried to deal with this problem of coordination,” Hurlburt said. “And as hard as intelligence or police coordination in the US is, you multiply that by the number of entities that you’re dealing with in Europe and it’s that much more difficult.”

Is the US more dangerous in some way?

Arguably by one measure – guns – yes. By most estimates the US has nearly as many guns as citizens. Although only a minority of households keep guns, research shows where there are more guns there are more homicides. With more than 1,000 mass shootings since a gunman killed 26 people at an elementary school in 2012, there have been killings in schools, theaters, churches and other public places .

Andrew Lebovich, a visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, noted that although “al-Qaida, years ago, was urging American Muslims to pick up guns and start a mass shooting”, none had managed to achieve an attack near the scale of Paris.

An American gunman killed 13 people in 2009 at Fort Hood, and the US-raised Tsarnaev brothers bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013. Canada suffered a string of terrorist attacks last year; the men responsible are believed to have self-radicalized.

Years of research by Pew show that America’s small, newer Muslim population is relatively well integrated: a middle-class group that encounters post-9/11 prejudice but rejects extremism, and by larger margins than their counterparts in western Europe. Even in Europe, Isis “recruits only at the margins”, notes Jason Burke, the Guardian’s south Asia correspondent and author of Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror.

“Although France has really strict gun laws, there has been an explosion in the availability of illegal guns in the last couple of years,” Hurlburt said. “There are a lot more routes to transport guns from conflicts in eastern Europe and north Africa, and attackers seem to be exploiting that the European authorities haven’t figured out how to deal with illegal guns very well.”

Should Americans fear “homegrown” terrorists?

The threat of domestic terrorism is real in Europe and the US and Canada, albeit to different extents and in different forms.

In Europe since 2001, a mix of foreign and domestic men have accomplished serious terrorist attacks: Spaniards, North Africans and Syrians in the 2004 Madrid bombings; four Britons in the 2005 London bombings; French brothers carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack in January, and, so far, French and Belgian nationals in last week’s Paris attacks. Some of the men involved had traveled to the Middle East, others had not.

In the US, few elaborate plots have gained any traction, while sole, alienated individuals – “lone wolves” with or without ideologies – have shown themselves capable of mass killings in public places. The pattern of indirect “inspiration” goes back more than a century: Ku Klux Klan chapters disavowed lynching while its sympathizers continued to kill African Americans.

But history also suggests that violent extremism has little influence in American Muslim communities. These small, disparate communities often descend from refugees, as with Minnesota’s Somali Americans and Michigan’s Bosnian and Yemeni Americans. (The Tsarnaevs, although sons of Chechen refugees, spent most of their lives in the Boston area and the elder brother apparently radicalized abroad.)

“Relative to our European cousins we are so good at this,” Douglas Ollivant, a counter-terrorism expert with the thinktank New America, told reporters on Tuesday. “The Somalis up in Minneapolis are dating the seventh-generation Norwegian immigrants.”

In France, by contrast, many Muslims live in or on the outskirts of major cities and descend from North Africans who came to work as laborers and have endured decades of discrimination and disadvantages, illustrated by the recent niqab ban and one of the worst massacres in French history, the 1961 killing of 50 to 200 French Algerians by Parisian police. France and Belgium have made concerted efforts to reach out to young Muslims, but both countries have seen unusually high proportions of disaffected young men travel to the civil war in Syria.

About 250 Americans have traveled to the war zones in Libya and Syria, compared to more than 1,000 from France and Belgium.

The Paris attack has challenged the notion that self-radicalized loners and cells are the greatest threat to the US and Europe. But extremists have failed to launch such an attack in the US.

A report released Tuesday by New America agreed a coordinated plot was less likely than an isolated attacker. The authors concluded that such this “inspired” threat poses “a more immediate challenge” and is a “strong possibility”. Similarly, the president of the security-minded Atlantic Council said similar attacks could be an “unfortunate new normal” for the west.

Do refugees play a part?

Not really, for the US at least. The American refugee screening process is a 12- to 18-month slog of bureaucracy, interviews and persistence, and the people who make it to the US almost never seek out trouble once they’ve landed. Since 9/11 the US has taken in more than 780,000 refugees, only three of whom have been arrested on terrorism charges, according to the State Department and Migration Policy Institute.

“Refugees don’t get to come directly to the US,” Hurlburt said. “Usually you sit in a UN camp for months or more likely years, because we just don’t take anyone who seems even slightly dodgy.”

Nor has the US made it easy for people seeking entry without refugee status. The US keeps large and restrictive watchlists, has information-sharing agreements with many countries, and has increased visa requirements since 9/11 (several of the plotters were repeatedly denied visas).

Barack Obama and others argue that turning on refugees falls into a trap set by extremists, and would only fuel discontent.

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