“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you …”
by digby
I’m getting that strange feeling I had after 9/11 again when I nervously observed people I admired getting hysterical over the fact that religious extremists had launched a terrorist attack and conflated that act with something like World War II. That was an epic attack to be sure, but even so, it did not represent an existential threat to the most powerful nation on earth and the shrieking about the Clash of Civilizations was overwrought and destructive. Still, considering the events of the last few days it’s understandable that people would be afraid. And unfortunately, it’s entirely predictable that liberals who have tried to find a way these last few years to condemn extremism without alienating the vast majority of Muslims are being held up as appeasers who are selling out our Western values. That’s just the way these things work.
But that does not change the fact that this violence does not actually represent an existential threat to our way of life any more than the much more dramatic events of 9/11 did and those who are losing their grip over it are irrational. The threat to our way of life comes in the reaction and I’m sorry to say that it’s these critics who are facilitators in that project. That is, in fact, whole the point of terrorism and why it’s so frustrating to see people who allegedly care about our way of life falling into the trap head first.
After all, we have mass killing in this country all the time and we manage to keep calm and carry on:
Sandy Hook, the Washington Navy Yard and, again, Fort Hood. These place names signify terrible tragedies that continue to prompt deep reflection from policymakers and the public about how to stop acts of mass violence in the United States.
While FBI statistics show that levels of violent crime in the United States, including murder, have steadily declined since 1991, acts of murder and non-negligent manslaughter still claim about 15,000 lives a year. More than half of all such violent crimes in a given year are typically committed with guns. Over the past 30 years, public mass shootings have resulted in the murder of 547 people, with 476 other persons injured, according to a March 2013 Congressional Research Service report. “[W]hile tragic and shocking,” the report notes, “public mass shootings account for few of the murders or non-negligent homicides related to firearms that occur annually in the United States.” For more on these dynamics, see the May 2013 Pew Research Center report titled “Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware.”
Even as the total gun homicide rate has fallen, however, some of the worst acts of violence in U.S. history have taken place within the past decade. Half of the deadliest shootings — incidents at Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Binghamton, Fort Hood (2009) and the Washington Navy Yard — have taken place since 2007. In September 2014 the FBI released a report confirming that U.S. mass shootings had risen sharply since 2007: From 2000 to 2006, there were an average of 6.4 annually; from 2007 to 2013, the average more than doubled, rising to 16.4 such shootings per year.
Our society is soaked in bloody mass violence. And yet each time it happens we go about our daily lives without succumbing to fear. This is not to say that intent doesn’t matter, it does. Some people are crazy, some people are zealots, some people are misguided and some are just cruel and homicidal. But I would guess those designations apply just as well to the Islamic extremists who perpetrated that horrific mass killing in France as they do to our homegrown variety of mass killers. They are not super-villains with extraordinary power. They are weak, marginalized misfits who found a reason to act out their violent impulses. Rationally, the threat they pose is little different than the workplace killer who comes into an office and mows down his co-workers — something that happens with frequency in America.
Again, the point of terrorism is to make us defeat ourselves. If we can deal with the fact that heavily armed lunatics walk America’s streets every day ready to mow down strangers for any reason at all without losing our grip, we should be able to keep our heads about us when a bunch of misfit religious fanatics do the same thing.
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