On Tuesday, the TSA — a federal agency not known for its generosity — gave American travelers a gift: They will no longer have to take off their shoes when going through airport security. “I think most Americans will be very excited to see they will be able to keep their shoes on,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The statement was, somewhat unusually for Noem, absolutely true.

The shoe removal ritual has been standard practice for so long that it’s easy to forget why it started. The British al-Qaeda recruit Richard Reid’s nearly successful effort to bring down an American Airlines flight mid-air in 2001 with explosives hidden inside his sneakers exposed an apparent hole in airport security. Within a few years, almost all but the youngest and oldest US air passengers had to get used to the awkward habit of holding their shoes as they shuffled through the screening line. (Unless, of course, they shelled out for TSA’s PreCheck system.)

The policy change is an implicit marker of underappreciated progress. The threat of devastating terror attacks in the US, so long an obsession among both officials and the public, has greatly receded. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the US

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