I believe what he says very strongly, and have been saying it myself for years.
“But I freely concede that in an open and free society, with the dangers inherent in Jihadist terror, in an age of mass destruction, there will almost certainly come a time when we will have to endure serious human and physical damage. Unless we get much smarter or get really lucky, this will happen. It only takes a handful of people in a vast country with relatively open borders to do enormous damage, as we found out on 9/11. And they didn’t even have WMDs. If Jihadists really want to murder us (and they do) and if weapons of mass destruction get into their hands (and what are the odds against that at some point in our lifetimes?) then we will have to endure what the British endured in the Blitz and the Germans endured in Dresden and the Japanese endured in Hiroshima.
And if we do not have the Constitution on the other side of it, the victory will be theirs’. Yes: that’s what America means – freedom, not total security. Man up and face it, like the first Americans did. Believe in our system as powerfully as they believe in theirs’.”