It didn’t make me feel any more secure than I had before 9/11. But even before that horrific day, I had felt — and written — that it was ridiculously easy for someone to carry a gun into a stadium or walk in wrapped in C-4. It wasn’t foreign terrorists I was worried about back then, just your basic American mass-murdering maniac intent on leaving this world in a hail of gunfire or an impressive explosion and taking a bunch of innocent bystanders along with him.

We may feel more secure these days at games, and in some big ways we are: most stadiums have protected their perimeters with concrete barriers and planters, making it difficult to drive a truck loaded with explosives into the side of the building. There are more police patrolling outside stadiums, and I have no doubt they have a better idea of what to look for than I do.

But feeling safer and being safer aren’t nearly the same thing. It’s like moving to California and going 10 years without an earthquake. You know it’s a threat, but you don’t think about it until it happens.

It’s that way with living with the threat of terrorism. Despite all the ways in which the world has changed and all the people who would love to do the United States harm in a big and spectacular way, we haven’t suffered an attack in five years. London’s subways got hit and Spain took a heavy hit at a train station, but there’s been nothing here.

We’re lucky in that what plots we’ve heard of have involved airplanes and sites that are symbolic of the country. In Israel, terrorists blow themselves up at bus stops and in busy shopping areas. No one can ever feel completely safe when the attack can come anywhere. But over here, we haven’t had a suicide bomber blow himself up in a subway or in a shopping mall or in a stadium or arena.

Some day, it will probably happen. Even those in the security business admit that it’s impossible to guard every venue in a vast nation against every threat. If an American could blow up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, someone can blow up another building somewhere else. And if something can happen, eventually it will.

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And if it happens in a stadium, that’s when getting into the games will become like getting on an airplane, with everyone going through metal detectors and dogs sniffing for explosives.

In the meantime, we should be grateful for that and appreciate the fact that going to the game hasn’t really changed or gotten more difficult. And that once inside, our biggest worry is the size of the lines going to the concession stands.

I hope it will still be that way five years hence on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I fear that it won’t.

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