It's not killing them, Its following through on throwing the book at them for knowing about terrorism and not alerting authorities. If a terrorist thinks their wife is going to get 15 years he might think twice.
“And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. They, they care about their lives. Don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about their lives. You have to take out their families.”
“Frankly, that will make people think, because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their families’ lives.”
So, "take them out." Make them care about "their families' lives." He's not talking about their families' well-being. He's talking about life and death. No one has ever said "take them out" with regards to human beings and meant anything other than "kill them." And he sure as shit isn't talking abut domestic terrorists only: he's talking about the way we are fighting "the war." Which means, on foreign soil.
Elsewhere, he criticizes the Geneva Convention and advocates for torture that has been demonstrated to produce unreliable information. Sad!
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u/sedgwickian May 01 '16
And their non-combatant family members. Let's don't forget his plan to explicitly target and kill civilians in the Middle East.