Nearly 7 years after the 9/11 attacks, domestic terror groups have been unable to maintain the reach they had in the 1990s.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Many observers attribute that to Sept. 11, for diverting the rage of disaffected Americans away from the U.S. government and toward foreigners, and for fueling the subsequent Patriot Act-driven crackdown. Others say the movement began to crumble earlier, when the Y2K disaster, a favorite prediction of conspiracy theorists, failed to materialize.

And part of the collapse may have just been human nature. “Many of the people had such huge egos that they didn’t know how to work together and keep the movement going,” said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at the liberal Political Research Associates think tank who specializes in the study of right-wing networks. “So it basically unraveled.”

In contrast to the 1990s, this decade has seen only a smattering of arrests of isolated plotters, caught before they could act. Syracuse University tracked domestic terrorism prosecutions over the last five years and found them down by 47%. California and Oregon were the leading states for prosecutions in 2006, with eight each.