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The problem is that Y doesn't actually have to be true for X to occur.

This basic bit of logic doesn't rule out that any of us could be a menace, thus X could occur for you too. Instead, we default in a situation where we have no evidence of threat to not being a threat.

Although Y is not true, the risk of a false alarm is very real. As long as that remains the case, if there are people who are willing and able to carry out X, then the threat of X is also very real. That is why X is a concern, and why your logic is flawed. People like Runaway would not be preparing for X if they did not already believe there was a high probability of Y being true. Because the risk of a false alarm of Y cannot be fully mitigated, then it is logical to also address X.

So what should we be doing about scary people like you, dalek?

Incidentally, if you've read my responses to Runaway, you'll note that I am not only critical of his desire to carry out X, but also about his belief in Y. Both of these are mental health issues. I do not believe it is healthy for Runaway to want X to happen, and he has stated that he would like it to occur. His belief in Y, which is paranoid and inconsistent with reality, is also very concerning.

What is "Y" here. For example, Runaway speaks of it as:

But, it might be better than allowing the progressives to have control. The so-called left is hardly any more left than the R's are, but they are strongly into authoritarianism. That left makes me look silly as hell with my claims of being an authoritarian. The REAL difference between me, and them, is the legitimacy of authority. If I recognize an authority as being legitimate, then I respect it. If I don't recognize an authority as legitimate, I fight it.

Your left wants to create it's own authority by force. There is no legitimacy to either the force, or the authority which they desire. None.

Let's look at a real world manifestation of that. Title IX was used by the Obama administration to create a weird unconstitutional witch hunting court [reason.com] in colleges which receive public funding:

A University of Virginia law student who was accused of sexual misconduct and banned from campus—years after the alleged incident—is suing the U.S. Education Department for giving UVA no choice but to rule against him.

His lawsuit is a direct challenge to the legality of the campus kangaroo courts the federal government claims are required under Title IX. Lawyers representing the student, John Doe, argue persuasively that he would have been found innocent of wrongdoing if not for the Obama administration's insistence that universities adjudicate sexual assault under the preponderance of evidence standard.

This makes Doe's lawsuit the strongest legal assault on Title IX to date. If successful, it could undo some of the damage wrought by OCR's [US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights] crusade to remove elements of due process from campus rape trials.

"This lawsuit is targeting the cause, and not just the symptoms, of the complete lack of due process on campus," Justin Dillon, legal counsel for Doe and a partner at the firm KaiserDillon PLLC, told Reason.

To understand why this lawsuit is such a threat to the government, it's necessary to understand how OCR's Title IX guidance has evolved over the years. Prior to 2011, the office had never held that Title IX—a one-sentence statute forbidding sex discrimination in schools—required educational institutions to adopt the preponderance of evidence standard in sexual assault disputes. Recall that the preponderance of evidence standard only requires 51 percent certainty that misconduct took place. While it is used in civil cases, criminal cases require a much higher burden of proof: the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard. (Campus sexual assault disputes, of course, are neither criminal nor civil cases—they aren't proper legal proceedings at all.)

It's important to note that the preponderance of evidence standard is the only aspect of civil court cases that OCR obligates universities to institute. In civil cases, for instance, plaintiffs and defendants are granted the critical right to cross-examine each other. Students have no such right in university misconduct hearings. In fact, OCR's guidance discourages cross-examination, and in several cases, OCR has explicitly forbidden universities from allowing cross-examination, according to the lawsuit.

Requiring a lower standard of proof—but failing to require, or explicitly excluding, rights that counterbalance this lower standard—was clearly a substantial shift for the government. But federal agencies aren't allowed to make up new rules out of nowhere: they are required under the Administrative Procedure Act to ask citizens to weigh in, subjecting the new rule to a public comment period.

Under different leadership during previous presidential administrations, OCR twice complied with the APA and published notice of proposed rules, allowing public comment. But OCR Assistant Secretary Russlynn Ali (predecessor of current OCR boss Catherine Lhamon) ignored this requirement in 2011 when she released the infamous Dear Colleague letter that informed universities of the absolute necessity of the preponderance of evidence standard.

In other words, an unaccountable bureaucrat wrote a letter which then morphed into a coercion of universities to adopt weak legal processes for sexual assault cases, including suspension of due process, an illegal low threshold for evidence, and forcing crimes into civil court. This is naked authority by force. Colleges were forced to comply by the stranglehold that federal government had over their funding. Having said that, a fair number of colleges had their own Quislings who were just fine with that state of affairs and eagerly contributed to the problem.

Here's more of the abuses [reason.com] in question. Notice that it took a Trump official to reverse this gross injustice.

There's more where that came from.