Taking my teenager to a soft target

Just about this time last year, I took my daughter and her freshly minted teenagerhood to our first concert together. Weezer was the opening act for Panic! at the Disco. Jiffy Lube Live, the venue just outside Washington, D.C., was packed with the same demographic that came to Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester where a terrorist struck.

On Monday, as I watched the scenes from England unfold on TV, it was easy to imagine myself and my teens in the same situation. Maybe the D.C. crowd’s Panic! fans were a little more “scene” style, but the stadium here was filled with the same preteens and parents dragging along younger kids, the same teens in little single-sex mobs, along with a smattering of hand-holding high schoolers on first dates.

There was no terror attack that night, but whenever I go to big events, I game out the obvious vulnerabilities. Before I covered the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, I was oblivious to terror. Now I see soft targets everywhere. Jiffy Lube Live offered a buffet:

Far outside the security cordon was a row of port-a-potties and a crowd waiting their turns. Not far from parking, men with assault rifles or a suicide bomber could have easily killed dozens.

A larger crowd of hundreds was gathered outside the bag check, vulnerable to the same attacks. There didn’t seem to be security up to stopping an attack.

Inside the venue, terrorists could pick just the kind of victims they wanted. Teens packed the lines for merchandise sales. Parents filled the beer lines and younger kids queued for candy.

It would be comforting to think that security experts can fix those vulnerabilities, but all they can do is shuffle the soft targets. The more battle-hardened the concert venue or football stadium, the longer the lines to get in and the more tempting the target. As events in Manchester proved, those who go to a safe concert always come back out.

Americans have spent more money protecting airplanes and airports from terrorism than almost anything else. Yet in January, a deranged man from Alaska put a handgun in his luggage, flew it to Fort Lauderdale and gunned down five people in the baggage claim. We worried so much about protecting people getting onto planes that we thought little about protecting those getting off.

And it really wouldn’t have mattered that much if we had the world’s safest baggage claims and England had the safest stadiums. The same nut with the same gun could have killed just as many of us at any strip mall Dollar Store in America. Alleged Manchester bomber Salman Abedi could have killed just as many outside a football game or in a shopping center.

Any feeling of safety that would come from securing soft targets would be a mirage. The real battle to keep concert-going teens safe is far from where Ariana Grande or Weezer will ever set foot: in the minds of the young people in immigrant communities, in the digital haunts of Muslim radicalizers and in the fight against the Islamic State.