Another non-Muslim demonstrates how easy it is to inflict mayhem on\u00a0American civilians.\u00a0 If we were teeming with home-grown (or immigrant) radicalised Islamists, as U.S. Representative Peter King and his orbiting neocon activists maintain, we should be seeing such attacks on a regular basis.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet we’ve been saddled with an entire federal agency dedicated to protecting us against a threat that is even rarer than these occasional outbreaks of purely domestic insanity.\u00a0 Of course, the punditry class is going to go into overdrive interpreting the Aurora shootings as a symptom of their favorite cause.\u00a0 Until we see more of a trend in such sporadic shootings, however, I would chaulk the tragic loss of life up to random and meaningless awfulness that is very difficult to prevent.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I also don’t quite understand why we consider colocated deaths \u00a0more noteworthy than serial deaths.\u00a0 About 80 people a day died in traffic collisions in 2010, yet no one bothers much about such predicatable loss of life.\u00a0 Do people assume a homicide risk more when they get on the road than when they go to a movie theater?\u00a0 Perhaps.\u00a0 But the death is the same.\u00a0\u00a0 There were 13,636 homicide victims in 2009, or nearly 40 a day, half of them black, half white or Hispanic.\u00a0 Many of those victims were as guilty as their killers, but by no means all.\u00a0 Admittedly, the Aurora shootings comprise a large fraction of that daily average, but again, most of those background killings will go unattended to by the media.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Another non-Muslim demonstrates how easy it is to inflict mayhem on\u00a0American civilians.\u00a0 If we were teeming with home-grown (or immigrant) radicalised Islamists, as U.S. Representative Peter King and his orbiting neocon activists maintain, we should be seeing such attacks on … Continue reading