Quite some time ago I published this thread, and then later came in to update it:
Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looki...: Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what cau...
In light of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and in San Bernadino California it seems time to update this to speak about something else. One being the characterization of criminal acts in a misleading fashion, the second ignoring a real and very worrisome phenomenon.
The first item has to deal with "mass shooting". The press, somehow, has decided that a mass shooting is one in that results in four deaths. That's absurd.
The reason that's its absurd is that a shooting involving that many people, while horrific in every fashion is a different type of crime, and probably more than one different type of crime, entirely. Quite a few family crimes of passion, again, horrific, involve four deaths. So do a lot of robberies, and so do a lot of inter-criminal warfare killings.
This isn't to say that these should be ignored, but they are different in character from true mass shootings. A family that erupts in violence has something totally different going on than some other types of killings. Likewise, a gang assassination is quite a bit different from nearly any other kind as well. Pretending that there's a one size fits all solution to these different types of homicides is absurd. Murders by gangs, for instance, aren't done by the mentally ill nor is any type of prohibition in implements going to prevent them.
The second, and truly bizarre, item is the absolute refusal on the part of some to recognize that what happened in Paris not only can happen here, it has been happening here. Nobody seems ready to admit it, but we not only are subject to attacks by radicalized Islamic terrorists, including homegrown ones, but we have been enduring this for years now. We just keep pretending that this doesn't happen, and except in rare instances, when they do, we pretend that's not what occurred.
By all objective standards, the killings in California earlier this week were perpetrated by Islamic terrorists. Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Mali were just that. Maybe they had mental problems as well and maybe Farook hated his employer or co-workers for some reason, but then maybe the attackers in Paris weren't mentally balanced either and maybe they hated crappy American music and Muslims who deigned to be fans of it. The critical element of it is the adherence to the Islamic State view of things. In other words, just because Heinrich Himmler was a creep who makes your skin crawl doesn't mean that he wasn't a Nazi official who authorized killings for Nazi aims.
This isn't the first such event by any means. Obviously the attack by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Boston fits this definition, but probably only the fact that they didn't use firearms but instead chose a bomb kept the analysis on that point from being really baffled by their motivations. We should note that Farook and Mali also had bombs, they apparently just didn't get around to using them.The attack by Major Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood, officially characterized by the government as an instance of "workplace violence" was also a terrorist attack of this character. Thirteen people died, not because he was a deranged discontent, but rather because he was motivated by his faith to carry out an act of war. The attack by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez upon a Marine Corps recruiting station, resulting in four Marine Corps deaths, earlier this year also fits this mold. Perhaps even the attack by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau upon the Canadian parliament had elements of this, although more than the rest also seems to have been mentally ill. Having said that, mental illness and terrorist attacks are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and a person can be motivated by a belief and mental illness simultaneously, with the primarily motivation perhaps sometimes being a bit of a sliding scale.
Why is this so hard to understand for us? Probably because we haven't thought of domestic terrorism much, in spite of Oklahoma City, since the 1970s, when we had left wing domestic terrorism about which we've completely forgot. But we shouldn't have forgotten it. In the 70s we had the Weathermen. The English had the Irish Republican Army and the Provisional Irish Republican Army and had them for decades. The Spanish have had violent Basque Separatists, the French dealt with Algerian terrorist, and had their own counter terrorist, in their war in Algeria. So such things are hardly knew, and aren't even to us, although we just don't want to believe it.
We are now in a war, and this is going to be a feature of it for a long time. Just as all Irishmen in Ulster (or anywhere else) weren't members of the IRA, and all Basque aren't members of ETA, and all Algerians weren't adherent to the FLN, it's the case that not all Muslims in the United States, or elsewhere in the Western world, are terrorist. Not even close. But combating these sorts of killings requires acknowledging that some members of some demographics will be attracted to radical movements within their demographic and we can't really pretend that this doesn't occur. It's just a fact. Some will in fact be unbalanced as well, which leads them to don the mantle of a movement to rationalize their violence, but not all of them will be by any means. Merely being a terrorists doesn't make a person a nut. And indeed people are often attracted to such extreme actions for reasons that are pretty idealistic, even if wholly wrong.
So, then, what of all of this?
Well, for one thing the Press, including the international press, does a pathetic job of this. The BBC the other day came out with a semi snarky article on this which general blames the event on American laws on firearms ownership. But it would not have done the same thing a few years back when violence by the Provisional IRA was common, regarding its own laws. European gun restrictions didn't keep the attacks in Paris from occurring either. All the press, and indeed the American public and leadership in general, seems to completely fail to grasp that we are in a war, and its a type of war that we haven't been in ever before. They are at war with us, and we are at war with them (if you are dropping bombs in some region, you are at war). A guerrilla war involves war with guerrillas, and sometimes those guerrillas are in your own country.
We need to recognize also that in such guerrilla wars, the number of guerrillas is infinitesimally small. Part of the reason guerrillas fight in this fashion is that their small numbers require it, but part is also because the fact that they will be identified with a demographic causes that entire demographic to become suspect, and tends therefore to result in prejudice and push it towards the extremist as a result. That needs to be kept in mind too.
But so to does it need to be kept in mind that the current war is between hard core Islamist views and everything else. The demographic, therefore, where recruits come from is in fact somewhat identifiable, if less and less so due to the recruiting ability of the Internet.
And we need to keep in mind that just because four or more people are killed in a singular event doesn't mean all of their deaths were equally motivated, and therefore addressing that doesn't mean that there's one single social avenue to do so. A politically motivated killing is not the same as one motivated by mental illness, nor is it the same as a criminal killing, or one that's some sort of terrible crime of passion.
All of this means that singular solutions, such as "we ought to do something about guns" or "everyone ought to carry a gun" really don't address this situation in any meaningful fashion. This post isn't really on either of those topics, but that's a simple fact. This years' big mass killings, it should be noted, have been terrorist acts in France (assuming we exclude the same in the Middle East, which we probably ought not to). And fairly strict gun control laws did nothing to prevent those from occurring, nor should we think that they would. On the other hand, given that we're dealing with warfare, the fact that individuals on the no fly list for being terrorist are not prevented from obtaining firearms is strange. The point is, however, that those who seem to think that this has a simplistic legal solution should rethink it. We've never been able to simply outlaw certain types of killings anywhere, just because we wish they didn't occur, and if simply passing a law would address people motivated by a cause to stop, the South Vietnamese would have won the Vietnam War.
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