Responding to political violence with "criminalization and strictly civilian law enforcement"

In "How Can We Neutralize the Militias?", in the 19 August 2021 issue of "The New York Review of Books", Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson argue that "[i]t is imperative that the US government resist the impulse to respond militarily to the threat of right-wing violence and that it sustain a law enforcement approach." They conclude that "[t]he overarching lesson for America is to stick to criminalization and strictly civilian law enforcement, both to preserve civil liberties and to avoid provoking even more extreme reactions." Would that the US government had responded to 9/11 with law enforcement and criminal trials rather than militarization, torture, and the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 September 2021)